BR  121  . S6  5  1923 
Sperry,  Williard  Learoyd, 
1882-1954. 

The  disciplines  of  liberty 


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THE  DISCIPLINES  OF  LIBERTY 


THE 

DISCIPLINES  OF 


1927 


THE  FAITH  AND  CONDUCT  OF 
THE  CHRISTIAN  FREEMAN 


BY 


WILLARD  L.  SPERRY 


MINISTER  OF  CENTRAL  CONGREGATIONAL  CHURCH,  BOSTON 
ASSOCIATE  PROFESSOR  OF  PRACTICAL  THEOLOGY, 
ANDOVER  THEOLOGICAL  SEMINARY, 

CAMBRIDGE 


NEW  HAVEN 

YALE  UNIVERSITY  PRESS 

LONDON  •  HUMPHREY  MILFORD  •  OXFORD  UNIVERSITY  PRESS 

MDCCCCXXIII 


COPYRIGHT,  1921,  BY 
YALE  UNIVERSITY  PRESS 


Published,  1921. 
Second  printing,  1923. 


TO  THE  MEMORY  OF 
MY  FATHER  AND  MY  MOTHER 
WILLARD  GARDNER  SPERRY 
HENRIETTA  LEAROYD  SPERRY 


Preface. 


THE  idea  of  Liberty,  in  one  form  or  another,  dominates 
the  religious  life  of  the  present  day.  No  matter  how 
troubled  the  waters,  the  Freeman’s  spirit  points  true 
to  this  magnetic  pole.  Given  this  initial  loyalty  a  man  may  box 
the  compass  of  all  other  religious  interests  with  an  approximate 
fidelity  to  contemporary  fact.  These  chapters  suggest  some  of  the 
outstanding  points  of  the  religious  compass  at  the  present  time, 
but  the  thought  of  freedom  is  both  their  point  of  departure  and 
their  goal.  The  reader  will  make  due  allowance  for  the  deviation 
due  to  personal  factors  and  will  correct  these  deviations  by  his 
own  experience. 

I  am  conscious  of  the  fact  that  these  pages  may  suggest  the 
cheap  and  easy  device  of  “scissors  and  paste.”  I  have  yielded,  in 
some  measure,  to  the  inevitable  seduction  of  the  other  man’s  effec¬ 
tive  statement  of  the  case  half  from  choice  and  half  from  neces¬ 
sity:  from  deliberate  choice,  because  as  a  reader  of  religious 
literature  I  find  that  much  of  the  value  of  any  contemporary 
book  is  drawn  from  the  constant  intimation  of  other  significant 
and  rewarding  books  lying  to  one  side  or  the  other  of  the  imme¬ 
diate  highway;  from  necessity,  because  no  man  who  is  thinking 
and  writing  to-day  can  deny  the  whole  premise  of  his  effort — the 
noble  communism  of  the  modern  religious  mind. 

In  particular  I  wish  to  acknowledge  my  debt  to  those  who  have 
directly  contributed  to  the  making  of  this  book.  I  fully  realize  that 
any  freshness  and  conviction  in  these  pages  is  very  largely  due  to 
the  two  parishes  to  which  I  have  ministered.  The  preacher  of 
to-day  is  made  or  unmade,  spiritually,  by  his  people.  They  either 
force  him  into  innocuous  conventionality  or  urge  him  on  to  the 
exercise  of  his  Christian  freedom.  The  lines  have  fallen  to  me  in 
more  than  happy  places  in  these  last  years,  in  that  I  have  found 
myself  ministering  to  men  and  women  who  wished  the  man  who 
preached  to  them  to  speak  his  own  mind,  irrespective  of  ortho- 

vii 


PREFACE 


doxies  and  heresies.  Preaching,  therefore,  has  become  less  and 
less  an  exercise  of  pulpit  rhetoric  and  more  and  more  a  certain 
experimental  thinking  out  loud.  What  the  practice  of  preaching 
may  have  lost  as  a  formal  art,  under  these  conditions,  it  has  gained 
as  the  personal  adventure  both  of  preacher  and  hearer.  If  we 
have  indulged  in  few  flights  of  perfervid  oratory  in  praise  of  our 
Christian  Liberty,  we  have  sought  to  think  candidly  and  con¬ 
cretely  about  various  aspects  of  that  Liberty  in  faith  and  practice. 
I  must,  therefore,  acknowledge  my  indebtedness  to  a  constant 
sympathetic  hearing  in  my  present  pastorate  in  the  Central  Con¬ 
gregational  Church  of  Boston,  and  during  a  previous  pastorate 
in  the  First  Church  of  Fall  River. 

I  am  further  indebted  to  my  friend  of  other  days  in  Oxford, 
and  now  my  kinsman,  Professor  Charles  A.  Bennett  of  Yale 
University,  for  many  valuable  suggestions  as  to  the  matter  and 
style  of  this  particular  volume,  as  for  countless  hours  of  comrade¬ 
ship  in  the  common  task  of  turning  up  the  fallow  ground  of  the 
mind;  to  Mr.  Wilson  Follett  of  New  Haven  for  final  appraisal  of 
certain  of  these  chapters;  to  Miss  C.  E.  Howard,  minister’s 
assistant  at  Central  Church,  for  patient  and  accurate  help  in  the 
preparation  of  the  manuscript;  to  Miss  Ruth  M.  Gordon  of  the 
Old  South  Parsonage,  Boston,  for  aid  in  reading  the  proofs;  and  to 
Mr.  Ellery  Sedgwick  for  leave  to  reprint  as  Chapter  VIII  of  this 
volume  a  paper  which  appeared  under  another  caption  in  the 
Atlantic  Monthly  for  January,  1921. 

Willard  L.  Sperry. 

Boston, 

February  4,  1921. 


vm 


Contents. 

CHAPTER  PAGE 

I.  What  is  a  Christian? .  i 

II.  The  Historical  Jesus  and  the  Problem  of  Religious 

Authority . 21 

III.  Christian  History  and  Dogma  as  Autobiography  .  .  42 

IV.  A  Modern  Doctrine  of  Original  Sin . 59 

V.  Is  Christianity  Practicable? . 81 

VI.  The  Counsels  of  Perfection . 101 

VII.  The  Scientific  Method  and  the  Religious  Spirit  .  .  112 

VIII.  The  Liberty  of  the  Parish  Minister . 134 

IX.  The  Validity  of  the  Church . 146 

X.  The  Work  of  the  Church  in  the  World  of  To-day  .  .  164 


IX 


CHAPTER  I. 


What  Is  a  Christian? 

THIS  question  was  never  more  difficult  and  never  more 
imperative  than  it  is  to-day.  The  latter  years  have  seen 
radiant  flashes  of  the  Christian  spirit,  like  broken  lights 
from  the  facets  of  a  great  gem,  shining  from  the  city  slums, 
battlefields,  hospitals  and  prisons.  But  there  are  very  few  of  us 
who  are  so  bold  as  to  identify  the  total  civilization  of  which  we 
are  a  part  with  that  Kingdom  of  God,  seen  in  prophetic  vision, 
to  which  Jesus  gave  himself  in  life  and  death.  And  there  are  very 
many  of  us  who  doubt  our  moral  right  as  individuals  to  that 
bravest  of  all  forms  of  self-designation — “Christian” — which  was 
first  accepted  by  the  disciples  at  Antioch. 

Nothing  is  more  characteristic  of  the  present  religious  mood 
than  this  new  humility  as  to  our  world  and  ourselves,  this  reluc¬ 
tance  to  claim  for  ourselves  identity  with  an  idealism  which  never 
seemed  more  absolute,  and  yet  which  never  seemed  more  neces¬ 
sary.  We  are  living  in  a  world  which  has  all  but  exhausted  the 
moral  possibilities  of  the  dogmas  of  enlightened  self-interest,  free 
competition,  paternalism  and  kindred  nostrums;  a  world  which 
finds  itself  driven  on  by  this  process  of  moral  elimination  to  the 
religion  of  Jesus.  The  pilgrim  soul  of  us  moves  on  to  Christianity 
as  a  last  resort,  an  ultimate  recognition  of  that  moral  necessity 
which  a  more  discerning  discipleship  anticipated  from  the  first, 
“Lord,  to  whom  shall  we  go?  thou  hast  the  words  of  eternal  life.” 
Francis  Thompson’s  “Hound  of  Heaven”  is  not  only  the  greatest 
English  lyric  since  the  days  of  the  Elizabethans,  it  is  the  spiritual 
epic  of  contemporary  Christendom  which  has  “fled  Him  down  the 
arches  of  the  years”  in  vain,  only  in  the  end  to  hear  the  voice  of 
Christ  saying, 


i 


THE  DISCIPLINES  OF  LIBERTY 


Lo,  all  things  fly  thee,  for  thou  fliest  Me! 

Strange,  piteous,  futile  thing! 

v*'  W  *1* 

Ah,  fondest,  blindest,  weakest, 

I  am  He  whom  thou  seekest! 

This  drift  of  the  modern  mind,  this  yearning  of  the  deepest 
heart  of  our  age,  is  very  far  from  being  one  more  formal  apolo¬ 
getic  on  the  part  of  professional  religionists.  Since  the  days  of 
Job  it  has  been  hard  for  the  bystander  to  believe  that  any  man 
serves  God  for  nought.  And  even  though  a  tolerant  skepticism  may 
concede  again  and  again  the  existence  of  the  churchman  or 
theologian  who  has  an  unmercenary  love  of  truth  and  a  disinter¬ 
ested  zeal  for  the  Christian  religion,  still  it  scents  the  presence  of 
some  system  to  which  the  professional  religionist  must  adapt 
himself  and  which  he  must  defend.  The  world  at  large  sees  even 
the  most  liberal  and  emancipated  churchman  struggling  by  the 
devious  and  morally  dubious  means  of  mental  reservation  and 
“spiritual”  interpretation  to  conform  to  hereditary  creeds  and 
liturgies.  The  nobler  and  freer  such  a  man  is,  the  more  he  excites 
the  sympathy  of  the  unchurched  idealism  of  the  day,  and  the 
more  his  inner  efforts  to  interpret  and  substantiate  his  position 
seem  to  that  world  lacking  in  the  liberty  and  native  integrity 
which  are  a  part  of  real  religion. 

“It  is  a  singular  infatuation,”  writes  Thoreau  in  his  “Journal,” 
“that  leads  men  to  become  clergymen  in  regular  or  even  in  irregu¬ 
lar  standing.  In  the  clergymen  of  the  most  liberal  sort  I  see  no 
perfectly  independent  human  nucleus,  but  I  seem  to  see  some 
indistinct  scheme  hovering  about,  to  which  he  has  lent  himself, 
to  which  he  belongs.  It  is  a  very  fine  cobweb  in  the  lower  stratum 
of  air,  which  stronger  wings  do  not  discover.”  This  obsession  of 
the  system  is,  patently,  the  greatest  spiritual  liability  of  the 
professional  religionist. 

We  have  had  in  the  past  quarter  of  a  century  many  efforts  to 
save  the  world  by  substituting  a  “New  Theology”  for  the  “Old 
Theology.”  These  efforts  have  relieved  here  and  there  the  theo¬ 
logical  tension  for  scattered  individuals,  enabling  them  to  conform 
conscientiously,  where  conformity  is  considered  the  synonym  for 
religion.  But  no  one  can  claim  for  these  substitutionary  doctrines 
that  they  have  been  effective  in  saving  the  world.  The  net  result 


2 


WHAT  IS  A  CHRISTIAN? 


of  all  these  revisions  and  restatements  is  the  slowly  maturing 
conviction  that  in  attempting  to  bring  in  the  Kingdom  by  tinker¬ 
ing  with  the  details  of  creeds  and  liturgies  we  have  been  working 
at  the  wrong  end  of  the  problem.  For,  as  those  who  have  carried 
this  process  to  its  logical  conclusion  have  told  us,  what  the  modern 
mind  faces  to-day  is  not  the  prospect  of  a  critically  emended  and 
rehabilitated  creed,  but  a  candid  reexamination  of  the  very  word 
“Credo”.  Moreover,  that  classic  manual  of  Christian  faith,  the 
fourth  gospel,  specifies,  not  that  those  who  have  a  credible  system 
may  be  assured  of  a  vital  religion,  but  rather  that  those  who  do 
the  will  shall  know  the  doctrine.  The  initial  appeal  of  religion  is 
always  to  religious  consciousness,  not  to  that  stage  of  religious 
self-consciousness  once  removed  from  life,  which  is  reflected  in 
our  creeds,  dogmas  and  liturgies.  Canon  Barnett,  pioneering  among 
the  poor  of  the  East  End  of  London,  once  complained  that  “the 
sad  thing  in  all  crises  is  the  way  in  which  good  people  use  their 
strength  in  trying  to  restore  the  old.”  In  those  words  he  passed 
judgment  not  only  on  the  political  and  economic  temper  of  our 
time,  but  on  its  religious  temper  also.  For  in  so  far  as  even  the 
most  liberal  and  modern  apologia  for  Christianity  has  about  it 
this  suggestion  of  a  system  to  be  upheld  rather  than  a  life  to  be 
communicated,  every  such  apologia  is  once  removed  from  the  zest 
of  living.  It  is  a  detached  discussion  of  life  rather  than  a  direct 
communication  of  life. 

But  it  is  not  the  flood  tide  of  familiar  ecclesiastical  apologetic 
which  interests  serious-minded  men  and  women  to-day,  no  matter 
whether  they  be  inside  or  outside  the  Church.  The  significant  signs 
on  the  religious  horizon  are  those  clouds  no  bigger  than  a  man’s 
hand  gathering  in  unecclesiastical  quarters.  It  is  still  very  hard  for 
the  church  mind  to  believe  that  any  good  can  come  out  of  these 
Galilees  and  Nazareths.  The  theologian  scents  the  minor  heresy 
of  the  novelist,  the  dramatist,  the  radical.  He  misses  their  major 
passion  for  a  new  world.  George  Bernard  Shaw  is  the  last  of  the 
moderns  whom  we  should  suspect  of  being  enmeshed  in  the 
cobwebs  of  a  dogmatic  system  or  committed  to  a  professional 
apologia  for  Christianity,  yet  this  same  heretical  Irishman  says: 
“I  am  no  more  a  Christian  than  Pilate  was,  or  you,  gentle  reader; 
and  yet,  like  Pilate,  I  greatly  prefer  Jesus  to  Annas  or  Caiaphas; 
and  I  am  ready  to  admit  that  after  contemplating  the  world  and 

3 


THE  DISCIPLINES  OF  LIBERTY 


human  nature  for  nearly  sixty  years,  I  see  no  way  out  of  the 
world’s  misery  but  the  way  which  would  have  been  found  by 
Christ’s  will,  if  he  had  undertaken  the  work  of  a  modern  practical 
statesman.”  Utterances  of  this  sort — and  they  are  multiplying 
very  fast  to-day— are  far  more  significant  as  signs  of  the  religious 
times  than  the  cumuli  of  conventional  apologetic  always  piled  up 
in  the  heavens  by  the  trade  winds  of  habitual  ecclesiasticism. 

The  most  notable  fact  in  our  present  situation  is  this  general 
turning  of  the  unchurched  mind  to  the  religion  of  Jesus.  There  is 
a  hopefulness  and  desire,  even  a  resolute  determination  in  this 
mind,  almost  unparalleled  in  the  twenty  centuries  of  Christian 
history.  The  effective  exponent  of  the  Christian  religion  to-day  is 
the  free  lance.  H.  G.  Wells  can  number  the  readers  of  “Mr. 
Britling”  by  the  thousands  where  the  preachers  must  count  their 
listeners  by  the  tens,  for  the  simple  reason  that  Mr.  Wells  cannot 
be  suspected  of  any  ulterior  wish  to  buttress  up  existing  churches 
and  churchmanship.  This  desire  of  the  modern  mind  to  see  Jesus 
has  its  origins  in  no  academic  or  ecclesiastical  interest,  but  in  the 
sorrows,  the  frustration,  the  perplexity  of  the  present  hour.  All 
of  the  self-contemplating  idealisms  which  in  one  form  or  another 
have  been  the  driving  force  in  the  business,  industry  and  politics 
of  the  Anglo-Saxon  world  of  the  past  half  century  have  served  us 
very  ill.  Men  turn  to  the  gospel  of  Galilee  with  a  renewed  interest 
because  the  gospel  of  Manchester  has  proved  such  a  shabby  sub¬ 
stitute.  There  is  left  with  us  as  the  net  result  of  our  experience 
of  enlightened  egoism  in  the  terms  of  mills  and  guns  the  deep 
conviction,  as  Shaw  puts  it,  that  “though  we  crucified  Christ  on 
a  stick,  he  somehow  managed  to  get  hold  of  the  right  end  of  it, 
and  that  if  we  were  better  men  we  might  try  his  plan.”  It  is  out 
of  such  vague  but  deep  and  real  convictions  that  the  present  need 
for  a  redefinition  of  Christianity  springs. 

Any  Christianity  which  is  to  win  and  hold  the  loyalty  of  the 
present  age  and  of  the  immediate  future  must  have  a  substantial 
body  of  intelligible  idea.  The  religion  of  the  last  century  has  been 
dominated,  in  the  main,  by  Romanticism.  The  Romantic  move¬ 
ment  came  into  being  a  hundred  and  more  years  ago  as  the  just 
and  inevitable  revolt  of  the  human  heart  against  the  arid  precision 
and  pedantry  of  the  eighteenth  century.  It  is  the  perennial  mood 
in  which 


4 


WHAT  IS  A  CHRISTIAN? 


Men  turn,  and  see  the  stars,  and  feel  the  free 
Shrill  wind  beyond  the  close  of  heavy  flowers, 

And  through  the  music  of  the  languid  hours 
They  hear  like  ocean  on  a  western  beach 
The  surge  and  thunder  of  the  Odyssey. 

This  recognition  and  release  of  the  great  ground  swell  of  human 
feeling  and  passion  was  in  its  own  time  a  right  and  natural  re¬ 
action.  In  theology  it  led  to  the  redefinition  of  the  religious  life, 
first  as  the  feeling  of  dependence  upon  God  and  ultimately,  in  the 
humanism  of  the  mid-nineteenth  century,  to  the  definition  of 
religion  as  a  generous  fellow  feeling  for  one’s  human  kind. 

But  no  single  thesis  of  life  persists  indefinitely  in  history  incor¬ 
ruptible  and  unchallenged.  There  is  a  moment  in  the  history  of  all 
Romanticism  when  it  begins  to  putrefy,  and  that  putrefaction 
ends  in  Ages  of  Decadence  and  Sentimentality.  In  due  time,  after 
Cowper,  Wordsworth  and  Byron,  come  Aubrey  Beardsley  and 
Oscar  Wilde.  And  then  the  wholesome  prophetic  spirit  of  man¬ 
kind  reasserts  itself.  George  Meredith  dips  his  pen  into  the  acid 
of  a  fresh  sincerit)^  and  writes  of  his  Diarist:  “She  would  have  us 
away  with  sentimentalism.  Sentimental  people,  in  her  phrase, 
‘fiddle  harmonics  on  the  strings  of  sensualism.’  ”  Leslie  Stephen 
in  the  cool  detachment  of  his  mature  old  age  rebukes  the  senti¬ 
mentalism  of  our  times  as  “Indulgence  in  emotion  for  its  own 
sake.”  Shaw,  half  Puritan,  half  Philistine,  takes  up  the  cudgels  in 
behalf  of  a  new  intellectual  and  emotional  austerity:  “Romance 
is  the  great  heresy  to  be  rooted  out  from  art  and  life — the  root  of 
modern  pessimism  and  the  bane  of  modern  self-respect.  .  .  . 
When  the  country  becomes  thoroughly  Romantic  it  will  be  un¬ 
bearable  for  realists.  .  .  .  When  it  comes  to  that,  the  force  of 
some  strong-minded  Bismarckian  man  of  action,  impatient  of 
humbug,  will  combine  with  the  subtlety  and  spiritual  energy  of 
the  man  of  thought  whom  shams  cannot  illude  or  interest.”  Of 
these  tempers  all  the  challenging  figures  in  modern  life  are  the 
signs  and  effects.  Indeed,  so  remote  are  Romanticism  and  its 
bastard  child  Sentimentalism  from  the  dominant  mood  of  the 
present  moment  that  the  congenial  spokesmen  for  the  generation 
now  coming  into  its  own  in  history  are  the  rebel  realists  of  life 
and  letters,  Nietzsche,  Strindberg,  Tchekoff,  Sassoon  and  their  ilk, 
all  cubists,  futurists  and  makers  of  free  verse  who  are  struggling 

5 


THE  DISCIPLINES  OF  LIBERTY 


to  escape  from  the  enervating  and  fundamentally  vicious  influence 
of  a  decadent  Romanticism.  They  may  find  themselves  forced 
into  strained  and  grotesque  postures,  like  the  figures  of  the 
Laocoon.  But  no  man  who  understands  the  deadly  peril  which  they 
sense  to  honest  thinking,  deep  feeling  and  strong  willing  in  the 
coils  of  a  sinister  sentimentalism  will  think  ungenerously  of  their 
struggle. 

If  Sentimentality  is  bad  in  art  it  is  even  worse  in  religion.  All  of 
the  initial  energy  of  emotion  in  the  theology  of  Romanticism  has 
spent  itself.  We  may  no  longer  conjure  with  human  feeling  as  the 
single  talisman  of  the  spiritual  life.  The  temper  of  the  age  in 
which  we  live  is  that  of  a  candid  realism,  suspicious  of  all  vague 
descriptions  of  religion  as  emotion  barren  of  idea.  We  renounce  all 
heat  of  feeling  which  is  not  also  a  light  for  the  mind.  There  is  a 
daring  and  splendid  phrase  from  the  sermons  of  John  Tauler, 
the  mediaeval  Dominican,  which  commands  the  respect  of  the 
modern  conscience,  to  the  effect  that  all  titillation  of  the  religious 
emotions  for  the  sake  of  the  immediate  and  passing  gratification 
of  the  nobler  nature  “shall  be  counted  to  a  man  for  spiritual 
unchastity.”  The  religion  which  is  to  command  the  respect  and 
response  of  this  age  must  be  free  from  all  taint  of  religious  senti¬ 
mentalism,  it  must  be  spiritually  chaste. 

Nor  will  the  familiar  and  persistent  efforts  to  define  Christianity 
as  Practicality  suffice.  Modern  psychology  has  glorified  the  hu¬ 
man  will,  and  in  the  face  of  all  doctrines  of  necessity  and  deter¬ 
minism,  has  exalted  before  every  man’s  eyes  the  major  energy 
which  he  controls.  This  modern  worship  of  the  will,  leaving  to  one 
side  both  thought  and  feeling,  has  been  reflected  in  the  popular 
religion  of  our  time  as  a  passion  for  service.  The  rapture  of  the 
mystic’s  transcendent  “twenty  minutes  of  reality”  and  the  mid¬ 
night  oil  of  the  thinker  have  been  superseded  by  the  cup  of  cold 
water.  But  the  modern  world  is  in  danger  of  forgetting  that  the 
cup  of  cold  water  is  a  religious  effect  and  not  a  religious  cause. 
It  follows  upon  some  clearly  defined  conception  of  our  relation 
to  God  and  man.  Of  itself  it  cannot  create  the  conviction  which 
must  always  sustain  and  inspire  it.  Organized  altruism  has  not 
plucked  the  heart  out  of  the  secret  of  perpetual  moral  motion,  but 
rests  in  the  last  analysis  upon  personal  conviction. 

The  absence  of  this  conviction  imperils  the  whole  present  inter- 

6 


WHAT  IS  A  CHRISTIAN? 


pretation  of  the  Christian  religion  as  social  service.  The  sense  of 
vacuity  and  worthlessness  already  begins  to  attend  the  per¬ 
functory  gestures  of  the  servant  who  has  no  clear  idea  whom  he 
serves  or  why  he  serves.  Ten  years  ago  a  B  amp  ton  lecturer  stood 
up  in  St.  Mary’s  pulpit,  Oxford,  and  pointed  out  with  penetrating 
insight  the  contradiction  at  the  heart  of  the  present  situation. 

“Sometimes  a  very  high  degree  of  practical  unselfishness  is 
accompanied  by  an  extreme  sense  of  uselessness  and  failure.  Such 
external  activity  for  good  without  conscious  enthusiasm,  almost 
without  interest,  is  remarkable;  and  the  account  which  the  actors 
in  the  tragedy  give  of  it  when  questioned  is  no  less  remarkable. 
They  explain  their  perseverance  in  right  action  and  in  the  service 
of  others  as  due,  partly  to  the  force  of  habit,  and  partly  to  the  im¬ 
perious  need  for  escaping  from  brooding  thoughts ;  but  stubbornly 
deny  that  it  has  any  moral  value,  either  objectively  or  to  their 
own  character.  They  maintain  that  their  acts  are  isolated  and 
meaningless,  not  springing  from  any  guiding  principle  within,  and 
in  turn  not  producing  that  feeling  of  comfort  and  power  which 
follows  on  really  moral  action.  ...  I  am  convinced  that  the 
thing  is  common — far  more  common,  perhaps,  than  we  are  in¬ 
clined  to  suppose.” 

Here,  in  substance,  is  the  old  dogma  of  salvation  by  works  and 
its  consequent  religious  misery.  Modern  Protestantism  is  fast 
getting  back  to  the  slough  from  which  it  first  escaped  through  its 
rediscovery  of  the  central  energy  of  all  religion,  the  doctrine  of 
justification  by  faith.  It  matters  not  who  sells  the  indulgences, 
whether  Tetzel  or  a  modern  philanthropy,  the  error  of  all  doctrines 
of  justification  by  works  lies  in  the  failure  to  discern  the  truth  of 
Emerson’s  dictum  that  “Little  souls  pay  the  world  with  what  they 
do,  great  souls  with  what  they  are.”  The  scarcity  of  great  souls 
in  the  Christianity  of  our  time  must  be  laid  in  part  to  the  brood 
of  little  souls,  who  are  fretful  unless  they  are  “up  and  doing.” 

We  may  well  hesitate  to  disparage,  altogether,  the  wholesome 
ideal  of  service  which  has  dominated  the  life  of  contemporary 
Protestantism.  This  doctrine  has  saved  any  number  of  young  men 
and  women  from  the  vices  of  introspection  and  of  aimless  self- 
indulgence.  It  has  given  an  escape  outward  into  a  world  of  action 
from  what  has  been  too  often  in  other  ages,  “the  isolated  dungeon 
of  my  self-consciousness  where  I  rot  away  unheeded  and  alone.” 

7 


THE  DISCIPLINES  OF  LIBERTY 


It  has  meant  hope  and  help  to  hundreds  of  thousands  of  the 
world’s  neglected  and  forgotten.  But  of  itself,  and  apart  from  the 
conceptions  of  God  and  man  which  underlie  it,  this  reduction  of 
the  content  of  religion  to  the  terms  of  social  service  offers  no 
prospect  of  permanent  spiritual  satisfaction.  The  religious  value 
of  the  cup  of  cold  water  lies  not  in  itself  but  in  all  that  it 
symbolizes.  It  is  the  gesture  of  the  believer  in  the  fatherhood  of 
God  and  the  brotherhood  of  man.  Its  permanent  worth  is  meas¬ 
ured  by  the  thirst  of  the  human  soul  which  it  satisfies.  No  man, 
therefore,  can  take  the  Christian  religion  to  a  fellow  human  being 
unless  he  himself  has  some  initial  idea  of  what  that  religion  is. 
The  small  boy  in  school  who  ventured  the  tremendous  observation 
that  “it  is  very  difficult  to  express  to  other  people  ideas  which  one 
has  not  oneself”  unconsciously  put  his  finger  on  the  central  weak¬ 
ness  of  much  of  the  Christian  “service”  of  our  time.  For,  as 
Tyrrell  says:  “When  all  are  sufficiently  fed,  clothed,  housed  and 
tended,  the  question  still  remains:  What  to  do  with  life,  a  ques¬ 
tion  which  they  cannot  answer  to  whom  philanthropy  is  the  whole 
of  life.”  And  these  persons  bulk  very  large  in  our  modern  churches. 
Their  definition  of  Christianity,  as  Tyrrell  pungently  concludes, 
is  “Practicality.  Circuibat  benejaciendo :  He  went  about  doing 
good.  ‘Doing  good’  seems  to  be  the  whole  of  the  matter;  more 
especially  that  sort  of  good  that  involves  ‘going  about.’  ” 

Because  Sentimentality  and  Practicality  of  themselves,  without 
a  central  body  of  idea,  cannot  save  the  world  in  which  we  live, 
our  time  must  reconsecrate  itself  to  the  plain  task  of  thinking 
through  the  Christian  religion  once  again.  We  have  shirked  this 
task  because  sentimentalism  in  religion  is  pleasanter  than  hard 
thought  and  practicality  is  easier.  But  we  cannot  effectively  make 
Christians  of  other  men  unless  we  know  what  Christianity  is,  and 
we  cannot  create  a  Christian  civilization  unless  we  have  some  idea 
of  what  its  outstanding  qualities  and  characteristics  will  be.  Since 
the  days  of  Darwin  we  have  consented  listlessly  and  amiably  to 
the  hope  that  a  Christian  order  would  evolve  automatically  out  of 
the  immediate  facts.  The  net  result  of  that  amiable  mood  was 
Hell.  In  so  far  as  the  whole  evolutionary  theory  has  any  religious 
suggestion  left,  its  pertinence  lies  in  some  conscious  control  of 
evolution,  wherein  a  clearly  defined  body  of  idea  plays  its  major 
part. 


8 


WHAT  IS  A  CHRISTIAN? 


In  one  of  his  letters  to  Kingsley,  Thomas  Huxley  once  wrote: 
“The  longer  I  live,  the  more  obvious  it  is  to  me  that  the  most 
sacred  act  of  a  man’s  life  is  to  say  and  to  feel,  T  believe  such  and 
such  to  be  true.’  All  the  greatest  rewards  and  all  the  heaviest 
penalties  of  existence  cling  about  that  act.”  Such,  certainly,  is  the 
sobered  temper  of  our  own  age.  The  heavy  penalties  exacted  of 
our  time  in  the  latter  years  had  their  historical  origin  in  a  vicious, 
semi-theological  dogma  about  the  state  systematically  taught  to 
a  nation  for  fifty  years.  Without  the  actual  creed  of  Treitschke 
and  the  consenting  opinion  of  a  great  body  of  heretical  believers, 
the  thing  which  the  world  came  to  recognize  as  Prussianism  would 
have  been  neither  possible  nor  dangerous.  The  years  from  1914  to 
1918  give  the  lie  to  the  cheap  current  platitude  that  it  does  not 
matter  what  a  man  believes.  In  history,  as  in  character,  what  men 
believe  is  almost  the  only  thing  that  does  matter.  And  the  un- 
happy  consequences  of  wrong  thinking  and  careless  thinking 
can  be  overcome  only  by  hard  and  right  thinking.  The  humble 
petition  of  this  time  is  certainly  for  a  heart  of  flesh  instead  of  the 
heart  of  stone.  Rut  its  sharper  cry  is  also  “More  brains,  O  Lord, 
more  brains.”  It  is  permanently  true  of  the  Christian  that 

Thy  friends  are  exultations,  agonies, 

And  love,  and  man’s  unconquerable  mind. 

The  current  definitions  of  Christianity  have  ranged  all  the  way 
from  an  arbitrary  and  absolute  idealism  to  a  nebulous  sanction 
of  every  native  virtue.  At  the  former  extreme  stands  Nietzsche, 
saying,  “There  was  only  one  Christian  and  he  died  on  the  cross.” 
At  the  other  extreme  stands  Donald  Hankey  pleading  for  the 
inarticulate  Christianity  of  the  average  man.  The  normal  religious 
mind  oscillates  between  these  extremes. 

At  one  moment  we  feel  deeply  the  loneliness  and  uniqueness 
of  Jesus  who  must  always  say  in  history,  “My  time  is  not  yet 
come.”  At  the  next  moment  we  gladly  admit  the  latent  native 
goodness  of  Christ’s  unavowed,  unrecognized  disciples  who  are 
not  far  from  the  Kingdom  of  God.  The  designation  which  at  one 
time  we  reserve  for  Jesus  alone,  at  another  time  we  confer  without 
a  single  reservation  upon  countless  humble  souls  who  in  the  ful¬ 
fillment  of  their  duty  go  the  extra  moral  mile  by  which  human 
society  is  uplifted  and  the  Kingdom  of  God  advanced.  If  the 

9 


THE  DISCIPLINES  OF  LIBERTY 


world  is  yet  in  doubt  as  to  what  Christianity  is,  it  never  is  in 
doubt  as  to  the  characteristic  Christian  act  or  the  distinctive 
Christian  word.  Edith  Cavell’s  words  in  the  moment  of  her  death 
ring  true  to  the  forgiving  cry  of  Jesus  from  the  cross,  so  that 
qualitatively  we  sense  the  identity,  and  feel  no  anachronism  in 
defining  them  as  an  utterance  of  the  mind  of  Christ.  There  is  no 
historical  incongruity  in  this  community  of  spirit.  But  to  isolate 
these  patently  Christian  episodes  and  aspects  of  the  life  of  our 
time  is  a  far  simpler  process  than  to  attempt  a  working  definition 
of  the  Christian  religion  in  something  like  its  entirety. 

In  attempting  to  answer  the  question,  “What  is  Christianity?” 
it  may  well  be  that  the  best  we  can  achieve  is  the  simple  sum  of 
those  human  situations,  actions  and  reactions,  where  the  dis¬ 
tinctive  Christian  hall-mark  is  plainly  visible.  Beyond  this,  pos¬ 
sibly,  our  definitions  of  Christianity  should  not  and  cannot  aspire. 
It  is  worth  while  remembering  that  Jesus  was  content  with  this 
method.  The  mind  of  the  East  always  moves  in  a  circle.  Its  total 
grasp  of  truth  is  the  sum  of  impressions  received  from  different 
angles  of  vision.  Jesus  never  defined  Christianity  in  so  many 
words.  He  moved  around  his  central  conception,  as  in  the  gathered 
parables  of  the  thirteenth  chapter  of  Matthew,  and  only  sug¬ 
gested  by  glimpses  of  its  contour  the  total  majesty  of  his  major 
idea  which  he  never  reduced  to  any  geodetic  map  of  the  theologian. 

The  Western  mind  has  sought  to  improve  on  the  method  of  the 
Eastern  mind  in  religion,  by  moving  logically  through  an  idea 
from  premise  to  conclusion,  until  the  whole  hangs  together,  not 
as  the  traveler’s  many  views  of  the  Alps  which  divide  Switzerland 
and  Italy  but  as  a  trip  through  the  Simplon  tunnel  between  the 
two.  It  is  an  open  question  which  method  casts  more  light  on 
the  central  fact!  Certainly  the  pulpit  could  do  no  better  service  to 
the  Christian  religion  at  the  present  moment  than  to  identify  and 
to  exalt  in  the  common  mind  the  countless  scattered  examples  of 
the  Christian  spirit  which  stand  out  clear  and  sharply  defined  in 
the  literature,  the  history,  the  biographical  incident  of  modern 
life.  These  parables  from  letters  and  life  bear  so  clearly  the  im¬ 
press  of  the  character  of  Christ  that  no  one  for  a  moment  would 
confuse  them  with  those  other  strands  which  have  been  woven 
into  the  total  fabric  of  contemporary  character.  They  plainly 
belong  to  Galilee,  not  to  Athens  or  to  Rome  or  to  Feudalism.  Our 


io 


WHAT  IS  A  CHRISTIAN? 


nearest  and  simplest  answers  to  the  question,  “What  is  Chris¬ 
tianity?”  might  always  well  be  cast  in  the  more  informal  and  less 
logical  pattern  of  Jesus’  teaching.  Grant  at  Appomattox  Court 
House  giving  back  to  Lee  his  sword  and  to  the  southern  cavalry¬ 
men  their  horses  for  the  farms  of  the  South,  Lincoln  tempering 
military  justice  by  the  everlasting  mercy,  John  Hay  returning  the 
Boxer  indemnity  money  to  China,  Father  Damien  among  the 
lepers  of  Molokai,  Tolstoi  writing  “Where  Love  is  there  God  is 
also,”  Francis  Thompson  singing,  “The  Kingdom  of  Heaven  is 
within  You,”  Edith  Cavell  standing  in  eternal  granite  in  Trafalgar 
Square  while  the  captains  and  the  kings  depart — “What  is  Chris¬ 
tianity?”  All  that  is  Christianity. 

But  since  our  Western  mind  is  as  it  is,  it  will  never  be  wholly 
content  with  this  elusive  and  parabolic  method  of  defining  the 
Christian  idea.  If  Christianity  is  to  capture  the  imagination  of  our 
time  it  must  be  able  to  give  some  more  coherent  account  of 
itself.  It  must  have  its  contemporary  credo ,  even  though  it  no 
longer  finds  self-expression  in  the  traditional  creeds. 

What  the  detailed  substance  of  such  a  statement  of  the  Chris¬ 
tian  idea  must  be  no  one  can  foresee  clearly.  Plainly,  however,  the 
form  in  which  this  idea  is  stated  must  be  one  which  is  in  more  or 
less  close  accord  with  the  general  intellectual  temper  of  the  time. 
The  unfitness  of  the  classical  Christian  creeds  as  a  vehicle  for  the 
statement  of  the  idea  stuff  of  contemporary  Christianity  lies  not 
in  the  difficulties  which  inhere  in  any  controverted  clauses,  but 
in  the  general  mental  temper  which  begot  them. 

For  creeds  are  always  the  product  of  the  reflective  temper, 
which  spends  its  energy  not  in  living  but  in  thinking  about  life. 
“Man,”  writes  Edward  Caird,  “is  from  the  first  self-conscious. 
.  .  .  Slow  as  may  be  the  movement  of  his  advance,  the  time  must 
at  length  come  when  he  turns  back  in  thought  upon  himself,  to 
measure  and  criticise,  to  select  and  to  reject,  to  reconsider  and 
remould  by  reflexion  the  immediate  products  of  his  own  religious 
life.”  While  we  cannot  controvert  this  statement  or  question  the 
validity  of  the  reflective  processes  of  the  religious  self-conscious¬ 
ness,  we  may  not  identify  theological  reflection  with  religious 
experience.  Historically  the  creeds  are  simply  an  item  of  the  theo¬ 
logical  process  as  a  whole.  And  theology  is  not  in  itself  religion. 
It  is  merely  the  science  of  religion.  It  bears  the  same  relation  to 

r 


ii 


THE  DISCIPLINES  OF  LIBERTY 


life  and  has  the  same  validity  in  life  that  all  other  sciences  have, 
no  less  but  no  more. 

The  science  of  biology  declares,  for  example,  that  protoplasm  is 
the  physical  basis  of  life.  It  goes  a  step  farther  and  resolves  proto¬ 
plasm  into  its  constituent  elements.  Protoplasm  is  an  unstable 
compound  of  carbon,  hydrogen,  oxygen  and  nitrogen.  The  pos¬ 
session  of  this  knowledge,  however,  has  not  enabled  any  biologist 
to  achieve  synthetic  protoplasm  in  a  laboratory.  The  best  that 
has  been  done  is  to  persuade  certain  minute  glycerin  combinations 
to  simulate  the  movements  of  an  amoeba.  But  these  moving  drops 
of  glycerin  are  not  life,  for  they  cannot  assimilate  food,  nor  can 
they  reproduce  themselves.  Biology  has  plucked  away  from  life 
all  her  mysteries  but  one — that  central  mystery,  however,  remains 
unread,  how  to  create  life  itself.  Only  life  can  beget  life.  The 
science  of  theology  stands  in  the  same  relation  to  the  spiritual 
life  as  does  the  science  of  biology  to  physical  life.  Each  of  these 
sciences  can  describe  its  subject,  neither  of  them  can  create  the 
life  it  describes. 

So  even  the  newest  and  most  credible  creed  is  still  impotent  to 
create  Christians.  The  burden  which  has  been  laid  upon  the  creeds 
in  the  past  is  a  burden  which  neither  they  nor  any  other  science 
can  be  expected  to  bear.  They  serve  to  interpret  and  codify  ex¬ 
perience.  They  do  not  create  the  Christian  life.  To  expect  the 
simplest  and  on  the  whole  the  most  satisfactory  of  the  historic 
creeds,  the  Apostles’  Creed,  to  generate  the  Christian  idea  of 
itself  is  to  misunderstand  its  relation  to  history.  Whatever  may  be 
said  of  its  origins,  that  creed  as  we  now  know  it  is  certainly  the 
result  of  reflection  upon  the  whole  religious  experience  of  the 
Apostolic  and  sub-Apostolic  periods.  It  is  an  idea  of  an  idea.  And 
to  expect  it  to  recreate  the  original  idea  automatically  is  to  make 
on  it  a  demand  which  no  science  recognizes  as  valid.  As  certain 
also  of  our  own  teachers  has  very  pungently  put  it,  we  do  not 
repeat  the  creed  of  the  Apostles  that  we  may  have  the  experience 
of  the  Apostles,  we  seek  the  experience  of  the  Apostles  that  we 
may  understand  the  creed  of  the  Apostles. 

Furthermore,  most  of  the  historic  creeds  were  fashioned  in 
times  when  the  faith  was  in  peril  of  change,  so  far  as  its  forms 
were  concerned,  or  in  peril  of  death  at  the  hand  of  the  heretic. 
The  creed-making  impulses  flourish  in  the  time  of  controversy. 


12 


WHAT  IS  A  CHRISTIAN? 


Some  of  the  creeds  carry  in  their  text  their  own  anathemas.  Most 
of  the  creeds  tacitly  suggest  the  anathema  hard  by.  It  may  well 
be,  as  Tennyson  once  said,  that  in  religion  we  have  to  choose  be¬ 
tween  bigotry  and  flabbiness.  But  if  so  that  is  the  last  option 
which  the  modern  mind  will  accept.  The  whole  moral  and  intel¬ 
lectual  discipline  of  modern  life  cuts  in  the  other  direction,  to 
the  fashioning  of  a  conviction  which  can  be  tolerant  without 
being  spineless,  which  can  put  away  intolerance  without  becoming 
impotent. 

This  is  the  religious  secret  which  the  creed  makers  never  under¬ 
stood.  Of  the  creed  maker  it  is  written: 

Indifferent  cruel,  thou  dost  blow  the  blaze 
Round  Ridley  or  Servetus;  all  thy  days 
Smell  scorched. 

And  it  is  just  this  scorched  odor  of  the  credal  stuff  of  our  religion 
which  makes  it  offensive  to  the  mind  of  to-day.  For  whatever  else 
may  be  true  of  the  deeper  religious  mind  of  our  time,  it  never 
willingly  lets  go  its  hold  upon  the  catholic  idea.  It  has  no  vestige 
of  interest  in  the  circles  which  hate  has  drawn  in  Christian  his¬ 
tory  to  shut  men  out.  Its  only  interest  is  in  the  circle  which  an 
outwitting  love  draws  to  take  men  in.  It  develops  its  position 
from  the  broad  premise  that  whoever  is  not  against  us  in  this  total 
matter  of  Christianity  is  for  us.  All  these  considerations  militate 
against  the  use  of  the  historic  creeds  even  in  revised  forms  as 
ideal  definitions  of  the  content  of  the  Christian  idea. 

But  beyond  these  considerations  lies  an  inherent  difficulty  in 
the  whole  theological  point  of  view,  credal  or  systematic,  which  is 
often  vaguely  felt  but  seldom  definitely  stated.  The  earliest  at¬ 
tempt  to  give  an  account  of  the  Christian  religion  is  in  many 
respects  the  best — it  was  called  by  its  first  exponents  “The  Way.” 
Whatever  else  the  term  may  suggest  it  implies  the  idea  of  motion. 
Now  theology  is  always  inert,  it  catches  life  on  “The  Way”  at 
some  point  in  its  progress  and  in  some  one  posture,  and  then  it 
presents  this  snapshot  of  a  life  in  action  as  being  the  substance 
of  that  life.  It  is  possible  by  taking  these  theological  snapshots 
often  enough  and  then  by  flashing  them  in  rapid  succession  before 
the  mind’s  eye,  moving  picture  wise,  to  create  a  certain  spurious 
impression  of  life  itself.  But  the  theological  reel  is  at  the  best 

i3 


THE  DISCIPLINES  OF  LIBERTY 


jerky  and  inadequate,  because  each  credal  picture  of  the  religious 
life  is  in  itself  a  motionless  thing.  The  inherent  fallacy  of  the 
creeds,  and,  indeed,  of  all  theological  systems,  as  definitions  of 
the  Christian  idea  is  the  fallacy  which  is  hidden  in  Zeno’s  famous 
puzzle  about  Achilles  and  the  tortoise.  The  tortoise  has  the  start 
of  Achilles,  but  Achilles  never  can  overtake  the  tortoise,  because 
while  Achilles  is  reaching  the  place  where  the  tortoise  started,  the 
tortoise  itself  has  moved  on  and  there  is  always  the  receding 
margin  for  Achilles  to  make  good.  In  other  words,  it  is  impossible 
to  define  motion  in  the  terms  of  rest.  And  that  is  just  what 
theology  is  always  unconsciously  attempting  to  do,  to  define  an 
experience  of  “The  Way”  in  the  terms  of  rest. 

The  Thirty-nine  Articles  served  in  the  day  which  drew  them 
up  as  a  fairly  adequate  account  of  the  religious  self-consciousness 
of  the  Church  of  England.  But  the  religious  mind  of  Anglicanism 
has  not  marked  time  at  that  point  of  the  Way.  “In  the  Church  of 
England,”  says  one  of  her  latest  members,  “I  see  nothing  but  a 
body  of  people  bound  together  by  a  Prayer  Book  and  an  agree¬ 
ment  to  differ  upon  every  important  point  of  doctrine.”  A  little 
over  a  century  ago  the  fathers  of  Congregationalism  moved  up 
onto  Andover  Hill  to  found  an  enduring  theological  City  of  God 
for  the  American  Churches.  They  prefaced  their  venture  with  a 
creed,  which  in  their  haste  they  said  should  be  “as  permanent  as 
the  sun  and  stars  forever.”  That  creed  lasted  approximately 
seventy-five  years,  and  died  with  Professor  Park,  who  found  him¬ 
self  at  his  latter  end  “the  dauntless  soldier  of  a  forlorn  hope.” 
The  longevity  of  any  credal  statement  of  religion  varies  inversely 
with  the  vitality  of  the  free  religious  spirit. 

A  thousand  books  have  been  written  about  Oxford.  It  boasts 
its  formal  guidebooks  by  the  hundred,  its  volumes  of  photo¬ 
graphs,  its  historical  brochures  without  number.  But  it  was  left 
for  Thomas  Hardy,  when  all  has  been  said  of  Oxford  that  can  be 
said  in  the  ways  of  formal  description,  to  suggest  the  central  idea 
of  Oxford.  The  lover  of  that  dear,  dear  city  must  always  turn  in 
the  end  to  the  truly  moving  definition  of  Oxford  in  the  opening 
pages  of  “Jude  the  Obscure.”  The  boy  Jude  stands  on  his  own 
Wessex  hilltop  and  looks  out  to  the  northeast  at  twilight  and  sees 
the  distant  halo  of  the  lights  of  Christminster. 

14 


WHAT  IS  A  CHRISTIAN? 


“  Tt  is  a  city  of  light,’  he  said  to  himself. 

‘The  tree  of  knowledge  grows  there,’  he  added,  a  few  steps 
farther  on. 

‘It  is  a  place  that  teachers  of  men  spring  from  and  go  to.’ 

Tt  is  what  you  might  call  a  castle,  manned  by  scholarship  and 
religion.’ 

After  this  figure  he  was  silent  a  long  while,  till  he  added, 

Tt  would  just  suit  me.’  ” 

Hardy  understands  the  true  method  of  life’s  definition.  He  is 
filled  with  unsuspected  suggestions  for  the  modern  religionist.  He 
writes  in  the  same  spirit  of  Angel  Clare  and  unhappy  Tess: 

“With  all  his  attempted  independence  of  judgment,  this  ad¬ 
vanced  and  well-meaning  young  man — a  sample  product  of  the 
last  twenty-five  years — was  yet  the  slave  to  custom  and  conven¬ 
tionality  when  surprised  back  into  his  early  teachings.  No  prophet 
had  told  him,  and  he  was  not  prophet  enough  to  tell  himself,  that 
essentially  this  young  wife  of  his  was  as  deserving  of  the  praise 
of  King  Lemuel  as  any  other  woman  endowed  with  the  same  dis¬ 
like  of  evil,  her  moral  value  having  to  be  reckoned  not  by  achieve¬ 
ment  but  by  tendency.  ...  In  considering  what  Tess  was  not, 
he  overlooked  what  she  was,  and  entirely  forgot  that  the  deficient 
can  be  more  than  the  entire.  .  .  .  The  beauty  or  ugliness  of  a 
character  lay,  not  only  in  its  achievements,  but  in  its  aims  and 
impulses;  its  true  history  lay,  not  among  things  done,  but  among 
things  willed.” 

These  words  will  bear  almost  direct  translation  into  their  reli¬ 
gious  equivalent.  The  creeds  are  the  record  of  things  done.  They 
are  never  the  statement  of  aspiration.  Even  the  most  emancipated 
of  contemporary  theologians  who  propose  a  drastic  revision  of  all 
the  creeds,  is  still  more  or  less  the  slave  to  theological  custom. 
He  is  harking  back  to  the  countless  efforts  of  theology  to  define 
the  vital  motion  of  religion  in  the  terms  of  intellectual  arrest. 
What  we  need  in  contemporary  religion  is  some  prophet  to  per¬ 
suade  us  that  the  Christian  idea  can  never  be  so  defined  for  more 
than  the  passing  instant,  and  that  the  true  history  of  the  Chris¬ 
tian  idea  lies  among  things  sought,  in  tendency  far  more  than  in 
achievement. 

Every  vital  character  defines  itself  in  this  way.  The  song  that 

IS 


THE  DISCIPLINES  OF  LIBERTY 


marked  the  turning  of  the  tide  of  northern  confidence  during  the 
Civil  War  was  “The  Battle  Hymn  of  the  Republic” — the  voice 
of  a  purpose  that  was  “marching  on.”  In  years  to  come  we  shall 
seek  to  recover  the  spirit  which  animated  our  country  during  the 
Great  War.  A  hundred  definitions  will  suggest  themselves.  But 
what  will  linger  longest  with  the  common  mind  is  the  memory  of 
a  thousand  boys  crowded  into  a  Y.  M.  C.  A.  hut  rocking  the 
flimsy  building  with  their  songs.  It  was  in  their  songs  that  they 
bore  testimony  to  the  deepest  facts  of  their  nature  and  character. 
They  came  from  Maine  and  Florida,  from  East  and  West.  And 
how  did  they  define  themselves?  Not  by  singing,  “My  country,  ’tis 
of  thee,”  not  in  “America,  the  beautiful,”  not  in  “My  Old 
Kentucky  Home.”  It  was  when  they  started  the  roof  from  the 
rafters  with  “Over  there,  over  there”  that  they  told  us  the  most 
significant  truth  about  themselves.  They  defined  themselves  by 
their  goal  rather  than  by  their  origin. 

There  is  nothing  that  modern  theology  needs  so  much  as  the 
courage  to  recast  its  definitions  of  the  Christian  life  in  this 
prophetic  form.  The  domination  of  religious  thought  by  the  back¬ 
ward  look  of  science  has  all  but  suppressed  the  entirely  logical 
and  defensible  definition  of  being  in  the  terms  of  its  final  cause 
rather  than  its  first  cause. 

So  far  from  forgetting  the  things  that  are  behind,  modern 
religion  seems  to  be  preoccupied  with  these  things.  It  would  reduce 
all  the  agonies  of  conscience  and  all  the  aspiration  of  the  human 
soul  to  the  various  nervous  states  of  our  unstable  selves.  The 
Freudian  zealot  exorcises  the  devil  but  substitutes  the  Oedipus 
complex  and  the  Electra  complex.  Religion  is  the  by-product  of  a 
suppressed  sex  neurosis.  We  sit  under  the  “Golden  Bough”  and 
are  gradually  disillusioned  as  to  the  validity  of  our  whole  religious 
experience.  And  eventually  our  retroactive  religion  is  seen  as  a 
thing  of  untamed  instincts  from  the  jungle  and  superstitious 
primitive  tabus.  This  whole  point  of  view,  which  would  fashion 
its  definition  of  religion  solely  in  the  terms  of  its  first  cause, 
“finishes  up  Saint  Paul  by  calling  his  vision  on  the  road  to 
Damascus  a  discharging  lesion  of  the  occipital  cortex,  he  being  an 
epileptic.  It  snuffs  out  Saint  Teresa  as  an  hysteric,  Saint  Francis 
of  Assisi  as  an  hereditary  degenerate.  George  Fox’s  discontent  with 
the  shams  of  his  age,  and  his  pining  for  spiritual  veracity,  it  treats 

16 


WHAT  IS  A  CHRISTIAN? 


as  a  symptom  of  a  disordered  colon.  Carlyle’s  organ  tones  of 
misery  it  accounts  for  by  a  gastro-duodenal  catarrh.” 

And  the  net  value  of  this  whole  retrospective  temper  as  it  is 
summed  up  in  James’s  courageous  verdict,  is  simply  this,  “Origins 
prove  nothing.” 

A  wistful  piety  has  tried  to  reach  a  working  definition  of  the 
religious  life  by  negating  the  complexity  of  modern  life  and  re¬ 
covering  the  lost  simplicity  of  some  Golden  Age,  in  the  case  of 
Christianity  the  Gospel  Age.  There  is  no  initial  error  in  religion 
so  grave  as  the  assumption  that  one  has  been  born  too  late.  To 
have  to  spend  our  days  in  a  retroactive  religious  experience, 
whether  for  worse  with  Freudians  or  for  better  with  the  pietists, 
is  a  grievous  penalty  for  living  at  all,  and  a  poor  substitute  for 
the  zest  of  life  abundant.  But  all  of  these  liabilities  of  contem¬ 
porary  Christianity  have  their  origin  in  our  docile  subservience 
to  the  scientific  preoccupation  with  first  causes  and  a  pseudo¬ 
scientific  wistfulness  which  is  always  dreaming  of  the  better  days 
that  were.  We  need  not  only  the  wholesome  salt  of  the  ancient 
Preacher’s  counsel,  “Say  not  thou,  What  is  the  cause  that  the 
former  days  were  better  than  these?  For  thou  dost  not  enquire 
wisely  concerning  this.”  We  need  even  more  the  prophetic  cour¬ 
age,  which  is  good  logic  as  it  is  good  religion,  to  define  our 
common  Christianity  in  the  terms  of  its  destination.  The  things 
which  a  man  aspires  to  be  and  is  not  yet  may  truly  define  him 
as  well  as  comfort  him. 

The  Pilgrim  Churches  understood  this  truth.  Its  undeveloped 
possibilities  are  still  their  noblest  bequest  to  us.  They  fared  forth 
into  the  darkness  believing  that  “more  light  was  yet  to  break,” 
they  committed  themselves  to  the  ways  of  God  “made  known  and 
to  be  made  known.”  There  is  about  their  initial  venture,  temporal 
and  spiritual  alike,  the  sense  of  vital  motion,  a  definition  of 
experience  in  the  terms  of  purpose  which  is  deeply  Christian. 
They  embodied  their  bond  of  Christian  fellowship,  their  working 
definition  of  the  Christian  idea,  in  covenants  rather  than  creeds. 
The  distinction  between  the  creed  and  the  covenant  is  the  abso¬ 
lutely  vital  distinction  between  achievement  and  purpose.  The 
temper  of  the  covenant  maker  is  essentially  the  early  ardent 
temper  of  pilgrims  on  the  Way,  who  forget  the  things  that  are 
behind  to  press  on  to  the  things  that  are  before,  who  count  not 

i7 


THE  DISCIPLINES  OF  LIBERTY 


themselves  to  have  apprehended,  but  who  feel  that  they  have 
been  apprehended  by  the  character  of  Christ. 

There  is  in  the  fourth  gospel  a  working  definition  of  Chris¬ 
tianity  which  our  time  would  do  well  to  ponder.  It  differs  from 
the  conventional  static  definitions  of  the  Christian  idea  in  terms 
of  intellectual  rest  in  that  it  seeks  to  define  the  Christian  life  in 
the  terms  of  motion.  “Him  that  cometh  to  me  I  will  in  no  wise 
cast  out/’  says  Christ.  Or  as  the  original  has  it  more  accurately,  in 
the  present  participle,  “Him  that  is  coming  to  me  I  will  in  no  wise 
cast  out.” 

The  Christian  idea  may  submit  to  the  theological  snapshot 
from  time  to  time.  These  photographs  of  its  infancy  and  imma¬ 
turity  may  be  gathered  into  a  history  of  dogma.  They  may  even 
be  thrown  before  the  mind’s  eye  as  motion  pictures  of  the  Chris¬ 
tian  life.  But  in  themselves  they  are  not  that  life  itself.  Each  of 
them  is  an  inert  representation  once  removed  from  life,  and 
impotent  of  itself  to  reproduce  life. 

If  the  vague  religious  consciousness  of  our  time,  groping  after 
some  working  definition  of  the  Christian  religion,  is  to  find  any 
statement  congenial  to  its  own  methods  of  thought  and  intelli¬ 
gible  to  a  generation  alive  with  the  sense  of  movement,  that 
definition  must  take  the  form  of  the  covenant  rather  than  the 
creed,  an  expression  of  an  ultimate  ideal  to  be  realized  in  the 
Way  of  discipline  and  discipleship,  not  by  a  guidebook  account 
of  the  halfway  houses  of  Christian  history. 

Whatever  may  be  said  of  the  content  of  the  creeds,  the  gen¬ 
eral  outlines  of  the  character  of  Christ  are  reasonably  intelligible 
and  familiar.  His  moral  courage,  his  patience,  his  sympathy,  his 
purity,  his  catholic  love,  are  beyond  all  question  of  a  doubt.  The 
individual  life  and  the  social  order  which  contemplate  these  quali¬ 
ties  and  which  are  “on  the  way”  to  them,  may  safely  be  defined  as 
Christian,  whatever  the  untraveled  road  that  still  lies  between  the 
present  fact  and  the  ultimate  ideal. 

The  only  possible  definition  of  the  Christian  religion  which  is 
catholic  enough  to  embrace  all  sorts  and  conditions  of  disciples, 
and  true  enough  to  experience  to  serve  as  a  vital  principle  of  spirit¬ 
ual  generation  is  some  definition  which  is  fashioned  around  the  con¬ 
tagion  of  the  person  and  character  of  Jesus.  Harnack  has  pointed 
out  in  his  “History  of  Dogma”  that  despite  our  modern  subordi- 

18 


WHAT  IS  A  CHRISTIAN? 


nation  of  the  Great  Man  to  his  social  whole,  no  religion  has  en¬ 
dured  permanently  in  history  which  has  not  reverenced  some 
historical  individual  as  its  founder,  inspirer  and  rallying  center. 
The  noblest  and  most  adequate  of  these  impersonal  religions, 
Neoplatonism,  which  sought  to  gather  into  itself  all  the  deeper 
and  more  permanent  aspects  of  the  religions  of  the  classical  world, 
failed  to  capture  and  hold  the  mind  of  the  third  and  fourth  cen¬ 
turies  primarily  because  it  looked  to  no  personal  founder,  and 
could  adduce  no  leader  who  could  be  plunged  as  a  concrete  center 
for  religious  crystallization  into  the  saturate  solution  of  the  ancient 
world.  Conversely  the  persistence  of  Christianity,  Islam,  Bud¬ 
dhism  and  Confucianism  is  somehow  irrevocably  bound  up  with 
the  historical  facts  of  Jesus,  Mohammed,  Gautama  and  Confucius. 

The  distinction  of  Christianity,  however,  as  against  its  great 
competitors,  lies  in  its  definition  of  Jesus  as  a  goal  rather  than  a 
point  of  departure.  Christianity  sees  Jesus  as  the  historical  author 
of  our  faith,  but  even  more  truly  it  sees  the  character  of  Christ 
as  the  spiritual  finisher  of  our  faith.  He  is  in  Christian  experience 
the  object  of  aspiration  even  more  than  of  memory.  And  the  wit¬ 
ness  of  life  on  the  Way  always  has  about  it  this  prophetic  quality 
which  theology  as  a  severe  science  never  voices. 

“Son  of  Man,”  writes  George  Matheson,  “whenever  I  doubt  of 
life,  I  think  of  Thee.  Nothing  is  so  impossible  as  that  Thou 
shouldest  be  dead.  I  can  imagine  the  hills  to  dissolve  in  vapor  and 
the  stars  to  melt  in  smoke,  and  the  rivers  to  empty  themselves  in 
sheer  exhaustion:  but  I  feel  no  limit  in  Thee.  Thou  never  growest 
old  to  me.  Last  century  is  old,  last  year  is  an  obsolete  fashion,  but 
Thou  art  not  obsolete.  Thou  art  abreast  of  all  the  centuries.  I  have 
never  come  up  with  Thee,  modern  as  I  am.” 

Over  the  valley  of  Zermatt  hangs  the  pyramid  of  the  Matter¬ 
horn.  No  visitor  to  that  valley  is  so  lethargic  that  he  is  entirely 
without  the  desire  to  make  the  ascent.  Some  men  stifle  those  im¬ 
pulses  from  an  inherent  laziness  or  cowardice.  Some  struggle  up 
to  the  Hornli  and  then  turn  back.  Others  realize  that  to  make 
the  climb  means  a  preliminary  discipline  and  spend  their  time  in 
making  more  modest  and  obvious  ascents,  postponing  the  real  task 
until  some  later  time.  And  still  the  Matterhorn  broods  there  cen¬ 
tury  after  century  in  perpetual  challenge  and  summons. 

In  some  such  way  the  character  of  Jesus  broods  over  the  lower 

i9 


THE  DISCIPLINES  OF  LIBERTY 


levels  of  human  character  and  history.  There  is  no  halfway  house 
of  achievement  in  the  ascent  of  this  ideal  at  which  the  ardent  soul 
may  stop  and  lay  claim  to  the  designation  “Christian.”  “Chris¬ 
tianity”  does  not  begin  where  the  undergrowth  of  secular  interest 
stops,  at  some  timber  line  of  the  ascent.  Essential  Christianity  is 
always  a  matter  of  orientation  and  movement.  Wherever  a  man 
may  stand  in  the  modern  world,  in  whatever  caste,  class  or  race  it 
matters  not,  if  he  sets  his  face  resolutely  toward  the  Christ  ideal 
for  human  character  and  human  society  and  begins  to  move  in 
that  direction  he  has  a  valid  claim  upon  the  term  “Christian”  as 
his  most  adequate  form  of  self-designation.  And  in  whatever  half¬ 
way  houses  of  motionless  orthodoxy  or  piety  a  man  may  be,  no 
matter  how  far  up  the  ascent,  if  he  has  come  to  rest  there  and  re¬ 
mains  content  with  his  past  achievement  and  his  survey  of  the 
slopes  already  ascended,  he  has  sacrificed  his  right  to  this  term 
Christian. 

The  ultimate  ideal  is  often  shrouded  in  clouds,  though  the  main, 
bold  outlines  are  again  and  again  revealed.  Of  the  character  of 
Christ  the  pilgrim  of  the  Way  can  only  say: 

Yet  ever  and  anon  a  trumpet  sounds 

From  the  hid  battlements  of  Eternity; 

Those  shaken  mists  a  space  unsettle,  then 

Round  the  half-glimpsed  turrets  slowly  wash  again, 

But  not  ere  him  who  summoneth 
I  first  have  seen  .  .  . 

His  name  I  know  and  what  his  trumpet  saith. 


20 


CHAPTER  II. 


The  Historical  Jesus  and  the  Problem  of 

Religious  Authority. 


HERE  is  a  couplet  in  one  of  his  sonnets  on  “Modern 
Love”  in  which  George  Meredith  says, 

Ah,  what  a  dusty  answer  gets  the  soul 
When  hot  for  certainties  in  this  our  life. 


The  great  religions  of  authority  have  all  attempted  to  meet 
the  demand  of  the  human  soul  for  certainty.  But  seen  in  retro¬ 
spect  most  of  the  claims  made  by  these  religions  and  many  of  the 
certainties  offered  are  dusty  answers,  at  the  best. 

The  history  of  Christianity  constantly  implies  that  there  ought 
to  be  and  must  be  somewhere  a  sufficient  seat  of  spiritual 
authority.  For  nothing  is  so  characteristic  of  real  religion  as  its 
inherent  imperiousness.  Behind  the  old  Calvinistic  doctrine  of  the 
Irresistible  Grace  of  God  lies  a  universal  fact  in  religious  experi¬ 
ence,  of  which  the  successive  centers  of  authority  have  been  the 
outward  and  visible  symbol.  This  fact  of  experience  is  the  aggres¬ 
sion  of  the  spiritual  order,  of  God  and  of  conscience  upon  the 
individual,  and  then  of  the  religious  individual  upon  his  world. 
From  the  days  when  Elijah  fled  from  God  into  the  wilderness, 
through  the  days  when  God  imperiously  sought  Augustine,  down 
to  the  days  when  the  divine  aggression  conquered  Tolstoi,  this 
fact  is  written  plain  in  all  religious  biography  and  autobiography. 
And  as  for  the  place  and  power  of  the  religious  man  in  history, 
Kipling  humorously  remarks  in  one  of  his  Indian  stories  that 
there  is  only  one  thing  more  terrible  in  battle  than  a  regiment  of 
desperadoes  officered  by  a  half  dozen  young  daredevils,  and  that 
is  a  company  of  Scotch  Presbyterians  who  rise  from  their  knees 
and  go  into  action  convinced  that  they  are  about  to  do  the  will 
of  God. 


21 


THE  DISCIPLINES  OF  LIBERTY 


Nothing  is  so  much  needed  in  contemporary  Christianity  as 
the  recovery  of  this  central  temper  of  historic  religion.  Modern 
Christianity  in  its  desire  to  be  conciliatory  and  irenic  has  sup¬ 
pressed  this  mood  of  imperious  aggression.  Furthermore,  it  has 
been  thrown  on  the  defensive  by  the  onslaught  of  the  natural 
sciences,  and  by  the  wholesale  criticism  of  a  candid  neopaganism. 
The  recovery  of  the  ability  to  go  into  the  field  of  history  under 
the  leading  of  the  legend  “Deus  Vult”  is  part  of  the  task  of  con¬ 
temporary  Christianity.  Without  this  sense  of  certainties  ac¬ 
credited  by  a  sufficient  authority,  religion  is  always  impotent  and 
at  a  strategic  disadvantage. 

There  are  not  wanting  signs  of  the  times  which  point  to  the 
recovery  of  this  central  temper  of  the  religious  consciousness. 
Whatever  may  be  said  in  criticism  of  Mr.  Wells’s  “Invisible 
King,”  this  must  be  said  in  his  favor,  that  he  has  something  of  the 
quality  of  spiritual  imperiousness  about  him  and,  as  every  student 
knows,  the  strength  of  the  elder  orthodoxy  lay  in  its  doctrine  of 
the  Sovereignty  of  God.  This  modern  religion,  we  are  told,  no 
longer  tarries  to  argue,  it  relates.  And  its  Captain  goes  through 
our  world  like  a  fife  and  drum  corps,  as  real  as  a  bayonet  thrust. 
All  this  is  very  alien  to  the  pacific  liberalism  of  our  time,  but  it 
stands  nearer  the  central  mood  of  historic  Christianity  than  do 
the  half-hearted  and  tentative  hypotheses  which  pass  for  Christian 
faith  in  our  time. 

“Religion,  therefore,  does  not  apologize  for  itself,  does  not 
stand  on  the  defensive,  does  not  justify  its  presence  in  the  world. 
If  theorists  would  vindicate  Religion,  they  may  do  so;  but  Reli¬ 
gion  comes  forth  in  the  majesty  of  silence,  like  a  mountain  amid 
the  lifting  mists.  All  the  strong  things  of  the  world  are  its  chil¬ 
dren;  and  whatever  strength  is  summoned  to  its  support  is  the 
strength  which  its  own  spirit  has  called  into  being.  Religion  never 
excuses  its  attitude,  and  when  at  last  a  voice  is  lifted  up  it  simply 
chants  the  Faith,  until  the  deaf  ears  are  unstopped  and  the  dead 
in  spirit  come  out  of  their  graves  to  listen.  There  is  nothing  so 
masterful;  and  it  speaks  as  one  who  has  a  right  to  the  mastery. 
It  is  the  major  control  of  thought,  to  which  all  systems  whatsoever 
bear  witness,  either  silent  or  confessed.  Authority  is  not  what  it 
requires  but  what  it  confers. 


22 


JESUS  AND  RELIGIOUS  AUTHORITY 

.  .  .  The  great-heartedness  of  religion  craves  expression  and 
must  be  expressed.  There  is  a  moment  in  the  act  of  worship  when 
neither  the  prayer  of  contrition  nor  the  hymn  of  adoration  will 
satisfy,  when  the  Will  breaks  the  leash  of  constraint  with  which 
the  understanding  has  held  it  back,  and  launches  itself  in  trium¬ 
phant  affirmation,  and  with  the  full  force  of  its  argument  within 
it,  against  all  that  is  irrational,  dark,  or  terrible  in  the  world. 
The  precautions  of  apology  and  self-defence  are  now  abandoned; 
the  baggage  train  is  emptied  and  left  behind;  the  soul  ceases  to 
parley  with  Principalities  and  Powers,  and,  in  a  joy  that  is  free 
from  all  fetters,  lifts  on  high  the  battle-hymn  of  its  faith  with  its 
deep  refrain,  T  believe.’  .  .  .  Religion,  no  longer  entrenched  be¬ 
hind  bulwarks,  is  now  seen  marching  in  the  open  like  an  army 
with  banners,  the  Ark  of  the  Covenant  in  the  midst,  and  the 
trumpeters  going  on  before.  Isaiah  and  Jesus  had  no  other  con¬ 
ception  of  religion  than  this.  They  spake  with  authority  and  the 
note  of  triumph  was  in  their  voices.”* 

The  moral  exhilaration  of  such  a  spectacle  cannot  be  denied. 
No  great  or  permanent  achievement  in  Christian  history  has  been 
realized  without  this  initial  temper.  How  to  recover  this  mood  is 
part  of  the  problem  of  contemporary  Christianity.  And  its  re¬ 
covery  is  bound  up  with  the  answer  to  the  persistent  problem  of 
the  seat  of  religious  authority. 

In  the  past,  great  churches  have  laid  total  claim  to  the  pos¬ 
session  of  this  authority.  The  temporal  efficiency  of  these  churches 
has  been  demonstrated  over  and  over  again.  But  their  spiritual 
efficacy  has  been  another  matter.  What  halts  the  modern  man  in 
his  submission  to  any  and  all  of  these  centers  of  ecclesiastical  effi¬ 
ciency  is  the  memory  of  the  by-products  of  superstition  and 
intolerance  which  they  have  worked.  When  the  Westminster 
Assembly  first  met  in  London  it  was  led  in  prayer  by  a  self- 
willed  prelate  whose  petition  ran,  “Lord,  we  beseech  thee  that 
thou  wilt  guide  us  aright,  for  we  are  very  determined.”  The  peti¬ 
tioner  undoubtedly  identified  his  will  with  the  Will  of  God.  But 
the  student  of  history  finds  it  hard  to  avoid  the  suspicion  that  as 
a  matter  of  moral  fact  the  process  was  reversed. 

Christian  history  has  seen  three  outstanding  efforts  to  establish 

*  “The  Alchemy  of  Thought,”  L.  P.  Jacks,  pp.  314,  315,  318. 

23 


THE  DISCIPLINES  OF  LIBERTY 


a  sufficient  arbitrary  seat  of  external  religious  authority.  The  first 
was  the  effort  of  the  Roman  Church  to  monopolize  spiritual 
authority  for  itself  through  its  Councils  and  Pope.  There  is  no 
emancipated  Protestant  who  is  entirely  free  from  the  religious 
appeal  made  by  the  Roman  assumption  of  authority.  One  such 
observer  noticed  in  the  military  hospitals  in  France  the  difference 
between  the  ministry  of  Catholic  and  Protestant  chaplains  to  the 
dying.  The  Roman  priest  entered,  made  the  official  gesture  of  reli¬ 
gion  and  proffered  the  certainties  of  absolution  and  salvation.  The 
Protestant  chaplain  entered,  ventured  a  few  tentative  hypotheses 
as  to  the  probability  of  immortality  and  let  the  matter  rest  there. 
It  is  no  wonder,  in  those  crucial  moments  when  the  human  soul 
craves  certainty,  or  at  least  the  note  of  certainty,  and  is  not  too 
critical  of  the  vehicle  of  that  certainty,  that  it  is  tempted  to  turn 
and  make  its  submission  to  Rome. 

And  it  is  not  to  be  wondered  at,  in  a  time  when  the  trumpet  of 
liberalism  gives  forth  an  uncertain  sound,  that  many  who  are  tired 
of  the  dusty  muted  answers  of  that  liberalism  turn  as  a  last 
resort  to  the  sounding  brass  of  Catholicism.  The  motives  which 
led  Newman,  Manning,  Faber,  Hugh  Benson  and  many  others 
over  into  Catholicism  are  varied  and  complex.  Newman  says  that 
he  could  not  explain  the  reasons  for  his  conversion  in  a  few  words, 
that  he  could  hope  to  give  an  intelligible  account  of  his  course 
only  to  those  who  were  willing  to  pay  the  cost  of  living  over 
again  with  him  all  his  troubled  transition  years. 

But  we  shall  not  be  far  from  the  central  fact  if  we  attribute 
to  all  such  the  hunger  for  certainty  and  security.  Newman  writes 
in  the  “ Apologia ”  of  “The  position  of  my  mind  since  1845”  that 
entering  the  Church  of  Rome  “was  like  coming  into  port  after  a 
rough  sea.”  The  only  difficulty  is  that  for  most  of  us  this  anchor¬ 
age  under  the  lee  of  the  great  headlands  of  Catholic  authority 
seems  no  longer  safe.  The  wind  has  hauled  around  and  what  was 
once  a  shelter  now  becomes  a  mere  inlet  of  the  open  sea.  Hundreds 
of  devout  spirits  lying  in  this  port  have  dragged  anchor  danger¬ 
ously.  Catherine  of  Siena  found  poor  anchorage  for  her  soul  in 
the  person  of  her  pope.  The  author  of  “Piers  Plowman”  found 
little  moral  stability  in  the  ecclesiasticism  of  the  fourteenth  cen¬ 
tury.  And  as  for  the  Modernists,  their  situation  became  so  des¬ 
perate  that  rather  than  risk  their  souls  longer  in  this  port  of 

24 


JESUS  AND  RELIGIOUS  AUTHORITY 

refuge  now  invaded  by  the  gale  they  put  out  to  sea,  preferring  to 
claw  off  to  windward  in  the  face  of  the  storm  of  skepticism  rather 
than  to  run  the  risk  of  making  shipwreck  of  their  faith  on  the  lee 
shore  of  Romanism.  Newman  was  a  rare  soul,  but  he  does  not 
command  the  intellectual  respect  of  free  men,  who  prefer,  in  want 
of  some  securer  harbor  of  authoritative  refuge,  the  risks  of  the 
open  ocean. 

Shall  we  award 

Less  honor  to  the  hull  which,  dogged 
By  storms,  a  mere  wreck,  waterlogged, 

Masts  by  the  board,  her  bulwarks  gone 
And  stanchions  going,  still  bears  on? 

There  ought  to  be  a  Church  like  the  Roman  Catholic  Church,  but 
that  Church  is  not  to  be  the  permanent  port  of  shelter  that  New¬ 
man  hoped.  Its  moral  holding  ground  has  been  found  uncertain, 
and  it  no  longer  offers  an  intellectual  lee  shore  under  which  to  lie. 

The  second  great  center  of  religious  authority  was  the  Protes¬ 
tant  Bible.  The  curious  thing  about  the  first  two  generations  of 
Protestant  Reformers  was  their  lack  of  faith  in  their  own  method. 
They  were  on  the  way  to  revise  the  whole  conception  of  religious 
authority,  but  they  lacked  the  courage  of  their  initial  conviction. 
They  saw  the  naked  and  uncorrected  individualism  of  their  early 
temper  leading  not  only  to  Geneva  but  to  Munster.  And  to  pre¬ 
vent  Munster  from  multiplying  indefinitely  they  were  compelled 
to  sacrifice  the  possibilities  of  Geneva.  The  latter  years  of 
Luther’s  life  are  sad  reading.  He  began  his  independent  religious 
adventure  with  a  great  freedom  of  mind.  No  higher  critic  has 
ever  outdone  Luther  in  the  matter  of  a  cavalier  reediting  of  the 
Bible.  Luther  played  fast  and  loose  with  all  parts  of  Scripture 
which  did  not  serve  to  buttress  his  own  propositions.  He  read  out 
of  the  canon  everything  that  savored  of  the  strawlike  religion  of 
Saint  James.  The  Book  of  Esther  he  despised  as  a  pagan  story, 
and  as  for  the  whole  Apocalyptic  literature,  it  troubled  him  so 
deeply  that  he  wished  it  were  not  there  at  all.  But  he  feared  in 
other  men  the  consequences  of  a  temper  which  he  trusted  in 
himself,  and  he  sacrificed  his  own  early  intellectual  liberty  to  save 
his  cause. 

Calvin  took  up  the  case  and  carried  it  to  its  theological  conclu¬ 
sion,  where  it  rested  for  nearly  three  hundred  years  in  Protestant 

25 


THE  DISCIPLINES  OF  LIBERTY 


history.  Religious  authority  is  vested  in  the  letter  of  the  Bible. 
The  significant  thing  about  Calvin’s  argument,  however,  is  the 
fact  that  he  fell  into  a  vicious  circle  of  logic  of  which  he  was 
conscious,  yet  from  which  he  saw  no  escape.  He  asks  in  the 
“Institutes”  how  we  know  that  the  Bible  is  the  word  of  God  and 
then  he  answers,  By  the  testimony  of  the  Spirit  within  our  own 
souls.  But  how  are  we  to  know,  he  continues,  that  the  spirit  within 
us  is  the  Holy  Spirit  of  God?  By  checking  this  Spirit  at  the 
standard  of  Scripture,  is  his  answer.  He  naively  remarks  that 
there  is  nothing  repugnant  in  this  circling  proof.  That  may  be  so, 
but  to  the  unillumined  there  is  nothing  convincing  about  such 
logic  moving  in  a  vicious  circle.  What  Browning  said  of  his 
preacher  in  “Christmas  Eve,”  who  dog-eared  the  Scriptures  in  his 
effort  to  prove  its  authority,  is  equally  true  of  Calvin.  We  sense 
“the  natural  fog  of  the  good  man’s  mind.”  And  as  for  the  logic 

Each  method  abundantly  convincing, 

As  I  say,  to  those  convinced  before, 

But  scarce  to  be  swallowed  without  wincing 
By  the  not-as-yet-convinced. 

The  Protestant  effort  to  establish  the  Scripture  as  a  seat  of 
religious  authority  represented  a  moral  advance  beyond  the  actual 
authority  of  the  Roman  ecclesiastics.  But  it  was  no  more  per¬ 
manent  than  the  Roman  claim.  It  was  doomed  to  go  to  pieces 
before  the  advent  of  the  historical  and  natural  sciences.  There  are 
few  churches  left  which  hold  to  the  traditional  Protestant  con¬ 
ception  of  the  authority  of  Scripture.  What  is  significant  in  the 
whole  story  is  the  part  which  subjective  interpretation  played 
from  the  first.  The  Bible  has  never  been  beyond  the  need  of  inter¬ 
pretation  and  adaptation.  Moreover  the  effort  to  prove  it  a  moral 
unit  forced  the  conscience  into  situations  so  grotesque  that  they 
were  self-refuting.  The  Calvinist  proposition  that  in  his  official 
capacity  God  has  done  and  has  to  do  a  great  many  things  which 
personally  he  would  prefer  not  to  do  is  an  ethical  absurdity.  The 
significant  feature  of  such  a  statement  is  the  intrusion  of  a  private 
moral  judgment  which  really  condemns  a  Jael  and  Sisera  episode 
even  when  it  seems  to  approve  it.  * 

In  admitting  that  the  consent  of  the  indwelling  Spirit  is  neces¬ 
sary  to  establish  the  authority  of  Scripture,  Calvinism  from  the 

26 


JESUS  AND  RELIGIOUS  AUTHORITY 

first  recognized  the  inevitableness  of  the  subjective  factor. 
Although  it  temporarily  arrested  the  full  fruition  of  the  Protestant 
principle,  it  did  not  permanently  postpone  it,  and  from  the  first 
it  had  in  it  the  latent  principle  which  was  to  overthrow  its  own 
standard  of  authority. 

The  third  attempt  to  establish  a  seat  of  external  authority  is 
found  in  the  liberal  Protestant  preoccupation,  during  the  nine¬ 
teenth  century,  with  the  person  of  the  historical  Jesus.  The  re¬ 
covery  of  the  Jesus  of  history  in  something  of  his  original  in¬ 
tegrity  will  remain  the  outstanding  achievement  of  the  religious 
mind  of  the  last  hundred  years.  We  now  have  what  all  the  inter¬ 
vening  centuries  have  lacked,  an  adequate  account  of  Jesus’  reli¬ 
gious  backgrounds  in  historical  Judaism.  We  have  an  intimate 
knowledge  of  his  wider  social  environment  in  the  cosmopolitan 
Roman  Empire.  Archaeology  and  geography  have  given  us  the 
homely  physical  setting  of  his  life  and  work.  Secluded  monasteries 
have  yielded  up  ancient  and  forgotten  manuscripts  with  variant 
gospel  readings.  The  sands  of  Egypt  have  added  their  fragmentary 
logia,  until  to-day  there  is  almost  nothing  left  to  be  done  or  more 
to  be  hoped  for  in  this  direction.  The  task  of  collection,  compari¬ 
son,  codification  of  facts  and  texts  is  over,  and  the  task  of  inter¬ 
pretation  begins. 

Royce  has  told  us  that  historically  Christianity  has  never  ap¬ 
peared  simply  as  the  religion  taught  by  the  Master,  it  has  always 
been  an  interpretation  of  the  Master  and  his  religion  in  the  light 
of  some  subjective  premise.  The  nineteenth  century  of  liberal 
Protestant  theology  began  its  work  with  the  axiom  that  whatever 
Christianity  may  have  been  in  the  past  it  ought  now  to  be  simply 
the  religion  of  the  Master,  free  from  this  constant  taint  of  sub¬ 
jectivity  introduced  by  the  interpreter.  It  set  up  the  Jesus  of 
history  in  contrast  to  the  Christ  of  the  creeds,  and  cast  its  lot 
with  the  former  as  against  the  latter  figure.  It  announced  the 
simon-pure  religion  of  Jesus  in  place  of  the  confused  and  complex 
religions  about  Jesus.  This  controversy  has  occupied  the  center  of 
religious  interest  for  the  past  half  century. 

With  it  has  gone  the  tacit  and  often  the  avowed  claim  that  in 
the  person  of  the  historical  Jesus  the  Christian  has  found  his  final 
seat  of  sufficient  religious  authority.  The  modern  soul,  still  hot 
for  spiritual  certainty,  is  bidden  to  turn  from  the  dusty  answers 

27 


THE  DISCIPLINES  OF  LIBERTY 


alike  of  Romanism  and  of  Calvinism  to  the  single  vital  historical 
figure  of  Jesus.  There  is  no  doubt  that,  in  so  far  as  any  center  of 
external  Christian  authority  is  possible,  the  Jesus  of  history  is 
the  most  adequate  and  admirable  that  has  been  found  or  can 
be  found.  And  many  a  man  has  come  to  rest  in  this  port  who 
found  poor  shelter  in  the  prior  anchorages  of  the  soul.  This  cen¬ 
tral  modem  distinction  between  the  religion  about  Jesus  and  the 
religion  of  Jesus  has  solved  for  many  their  problem  of  authority. 

How  easily  my  neighbor  chants  his  creed, 

Kneeling  beside  me  in  the  House  of  God. 

His  “I  believe”  he  chants,  and  “I  believe,” 

With  cheerful  iteration  and  consent — 

Watching  meantime  the  white,  slow  sunbeam  move 

Across  the  aisle,  or  listening  to  the  bird 

Whose  free,  wild  song  sounds  through  the  open  door. 

Thou  God  supreme, — I  too,  I  too,  believe! 

But  oh!  forgive  if  this  one  human  word, 

Binding  the  deep  and  breathless  thought  of  thee 
And  my  own  conscience  with  an  iron  band, 

Stick  in  my  throat.  I  cannot  say  it,  thus — 

This  “I  believe”  that  doth  thyself  obscure; 

This  rod  to  smite;  this  barrier;  this  blot 
On  thy  most  unimaginable  face 
And  soul  of  majesty. 


’Tis  not  man’s  faith 

In  thee  that  he  proclaims  in  echoed  phrase, 

But  faith  in  man;  faith  not  in  thine  own  Christ, 

But  in  another  man’s  dim  thought  of  him. 

Christ  of  Judea,  look  thou  in  my  heart! 

Do.  I  not  love  thee,  look  to  thee,  in  thee 
Alone  have  faith  of  all  the  sons  of  men — 

Faith  deepening  with  the  weight  and  woe  of  years.* 

That  is  the  voice  of  nineteenth-century  liberalism  at  its  best.  And 
it  carries  conviction  to  the  modern  mind  where  the  claims  of 
Catholicism  and  the  devious  ethics  of  the  theory  of  a  uniformly 
inspired  and  authoritative  Bible  carry  no  conviction. 

But  the  curious  fact  about  this  whole  century  of  effort  to  en¬ 
throne  Jesus  as  the  world’s  final  external  principle  of  religious 
authority  is  that  never  in  the  appeal  to  any  principle  of  authority 

*  “Credo,”  Richard  Watson  Gilder. 

28 


JESUS  AND  RELIGIOUS  AUTHORITY 

has  the  subjective  factor  been  so  prominent  and  apparently  so 
inevitable.  The  record  of  the  hundred  years’  “Quest  of  the  His¬ 
torical  Jesus”  has  been  told  once  for  all  by  Schweitzer.  And  the 
net  result  of  a  comparison  of  the  diverse  results  of  this  quest  is  the 
plain  conclusion,  as  Schweitzer  tells  us,  that  every  man  in  writing 
the  life  of  Jesus  writes  even  more  truly  the  story  of  his  own  life. 
It  is  not  merely  that  a  living  personality  is  needed  to  call  another 
remote  historical  personality  to  life.  It  is  far  more  than  that,  the 
plain  fact  that  the  gospel  does  not  admit  of  mechanical  imitation 
but  demands  vital  interpretation. 

This  necessity  is  bound  up  in  the  very  nature  of  the  writing  of 
all  history  and  biography.  There  is  no  escape  from  it  in  the 
reconstruction  of  the  life  of  any  great  man.  James  Anthony 
Froude  in  his  essay  on  “The  Science  of  History”  lays  down  an 
axiom  which  every  gospel  reader  must  accept  as  the  premise  of 
his  quest  for  the  person  of  Jesus. 

“It  often  seems  to  me  as  if  history  was  like  a  child’s  box  of 
letters,  with  which  we  can  spell  any  word  we  please.  We  have 
only  to  pick  out  such  letters  as  we  want,  arrange  them  as  we  like, 
and  say  nothing  about  those  which  do  not  suit  our  purpose.  .  .  . 
To  revert  to  my  simile  of  the  box  of  letters,  you  have  to  select 
such  facts  as  suit  you,  you  have  but  to  leave  alone  those  which 
do  not  suit  you,  and  let  your  theory  of  history  be  what  it  will, 
you  can  find  no  difficulty  in  providing  facts  to  prove  it.  .  .  .  In 
any  or  all  views,  history  will  stand  your  friend.  History  in  its 
passive  irony  will  make  no  objection.  Like  Jamo,  in  Goethe’s 
novel,  it  will  not  condescend  to  argue  with  you,  and  will  provide 
you  with  abundant  illustrations  of  the  thing  you  wish  to  believe. 
.  .  .  ‘My  friend,’  said  Faust,  to  the  student  growing  enthusiastic 
about  the  spirit  of  the  past  ages,  ‘my  friend,  the  times  which  are 
gone  are  a  book  with  seven  seals;  and  what  you  call  the  spirit  of 
past  ages  is  but  the  spirit  of  this  or  that  worthy  gentleman  in 
whose  mind  those  ages  are  reflected.’  ” 

We  can  see  the  process  at  work  within  the  limits  of  the  four 
gospels  themselves.  The  first  three  synoptic  gospels  are  photo¬ 
graphs  of  Jesus.  The  fourth  gospel  is  candidly  a  portrait.  But  even 
the  three  photographs  are  not  identical.  Mark’s  gospel  probably 
comes  the  nearest  to  being  an  untouched  original,  but  it  is  a  per¬ 
fectly  open  question  whether  the  practices  of  the  Roman  Church 

29 


THE  DISCIPLINES  OF  LIBERTY 

in  the  first  century  have  not  entered  into  the  making  of  that 
gospel.  As  for  the  first  and  third  gospels,  the  negative  has  ob¬ 
viously  been  retouched,  in  the  first  instance  to  make  it  conform 
more  closely  to  the  Messianic  expectation,  in  the  latter  case  to 
take  away  the  more  severely  Jewish  lines  from  the  face  of  Christ 
and  to  give  that  face  a  fuller  cosmopolitanism. 

As  for  the  fourth  gospel,  all  attempt  at  literary  photography  has 
been  abandoned,  and  we  have  instead  a  candid  portrait,  which 
succeeds  not  only  in  emphasizing  certain  lineaments  of  the  Christ, 
but  which  also  betrays  the  experience  of  the  artist.  The  subjective 
element  is  so  strongly  infused  into  the  treatment  of  the  theme 
that  again  and  again  in  the  early  part  of  the  gospel  we  find  a 
chapter  beginning  with  what  profess  to  be  the  ipsissima  verba  of 
Jesus  and  ending  with  the  reflections  of  the  evangelist.  But  the 
whole  chapter  is  of  a  single  literary  and  spiritual  texture,  and  it 
is  impossible  to  tell  where  the  words  of  Jesus  are  supposed  to  end 
and  the  meditations  of  the  writer  begin.  Yet  it  is  this  quality  of 
the  fourth  gospel  which  gives  it  its  perennial  charm  and  power, 
and  which  makes  it  what  the  synoptic  gospels  never  can  quite  be, 
the  voice  of  Christian  experience.  We  shall  never  recover  the 
original  literary  negative.  Such  negatives  as  we  have  have  all  been 
retouched,  and  before  we  use  them  we  shall  retouch  them  still 
farther.  More  than  that,  most  of  us  in  our  study  of  the  character 
of  Jesus  are  candidly  Johannine,  creative  artists  treating  our 
subject  as  free  interpreters.  It  cannot  be  otherwise. 

In  his  “History  of  European  Morals,”  Lecky  describes  in  detail 
the  two  temperaments  which  William  James  has  roughly  differen¬ 
tiated  as  the  “tough”  and  the  “tender”  natures.  He  says: 

“The  first  are  by  nature  Stoics,  and  the  second  Epicureans,  and 
if  they  proceed  to  reason  about  the  summum  bonum  of  the  affec¬ 
tions,  it  is  more  than  probable  that  in  each  case  their  characters 
will  determine  their  theories  ...”  for  there  is  a  “predisposition 
which  leads  men  in  their  estimate  of  the  comparative  excellence 
of  different  qualities  to  select  for  the  highest  eulogy  those  which 
are  most  congruous  to  their  own  characters.” 

This  axiom,  which  underlies  all  historical  writing,  as  well  as  all 
ethics  and  philosophy,  never  had  clearer  exemplification  than  in 
the  so-called  modern  biographies  of  Jesus. 

Recall  for  the  moment  some  of  the  outstanding  lives  of  Jesus  of 

30 


JESUS  AND  RELIGIOUS  AUTHORITY 

recent  years.  The  subjective  element  of  the  interpreter  is  plainly 
visible  in  them  all.  He  who  runs  reads  not  so  much  the  bare  facts 
about  Jesus  as  the  chronicle  of  the  religious  ideals  of  all  sorts  and 
conditions  of  men  who  have  been  drawn  to  Jesus. 

Renan’s  “Life  of  Jesus”  is  patently  three  parts  Renan  and  one 
part  Jesus.  “It  is  Christian  art  in  the  worst  sense  of  the  word,  the 
art  of  the  wax  image.  The  gentle  Jesus,  the  beautiful  Mary,  the 
fair  Galileans  who  formed  the  retinue  of  the  amiable  carpenter 
might  have  been  taken  in  a  body  from  the  shop  window  of  an 
ecclesiastical  art  emporium  in  the  Place  St.  Sulpice.”  Harnack 
made  a  consistent  and  conscientious  effort  to  give  us  a  true  and 
credible  picture  of  the  Jesus  of  history,  but  of  this  effort  Tyrrell 
says,  with  swift  ironic  insight,  “The  Christ  that  Harnack  sees 
looking  back  through  nineteen  centuries  of  Christian  dogma  is 
nothing  but  the  reflection  of  a  liberal  Protestant  face  seen  at  the 
bottom  of  a  deep  well.”  To  Voltaire  Jesus  was  merely  the  greatest 
of  the  moralists,  and  his  picture  of  Jesus  simply  an  item  in  the 
rising  humanitarian  passion  of  a  hundred  odd  years  ago.  Goethe 
and  the  Romantic  school  found  in  Jesus  an  incarnation  of  their 
deity,  Genius.  To  Carlyle,  Jesus  was  the  greatest  of  heroes. 
Strauss  was  a  Hegelian,  and  his  life  of  Jesus  owes  its  whole  form 
and  movement  to  Hegel  rather  than  to  the  original  gospels. 
Matthew  Arnold  read  into  the  gospels  and  then  out  of  them  the 
mildness  and  sweet  reasonableness  of  Balliol  and  Oxford.  Tom 
Hughes  found  a  justification  for  his  own  virile  pugnacity  in  a 
“Manliness  of  Christ”  which  savors  far  more  of  the  Philistine  life 
of  an  English  public  school  than  of  the  Mount  of  Beatitudes. 
Wagner  saw  in  Jesus  the  inspirer  of  his  romantic  dramas  of  love, 
sin  and  redemption.  Tolstoi’s  familiar  and  arresting  interpretation 
of  the  gospel  owes  most  of  its  potency  to  the  temperamental 
quietism  of  Russian  Christianity.  Wendell  Phillips,  facing  the 
stolid  hostility  of  respectable  Boston,  was  drawn  to  Jesus  as  “the 
sedition  of  the  streets.”  Oscar  Wilde  in  Reading  jail  read  Jesus  as 
the  artist  at  life,  and  found  a  sweetly  melancholy  satisfaction  in 
the  thought  that  he  might  prove  another  such  great  artist  and 
actor.  Shaw  reads  out  of  the  gospels  the  tenets  of  economic  com¬ 
munism  to  which  he  has  long  been  committed.  Bouck  White  finds 
in  Jesus  the  sanctions  for  his  own  radical  socialism. 

When  we  come  to  less  distinguished  but  not  less  assured  inter- 

31 


THE  DISCIPLINES  OF  LIBERTY 


preters  of  Jesus  in  our  own  circles,  the  appeal  to  Jesus  as  a  sanc¬ 
tion  and  authoritative  pattern  lapses  often  into  the  grotesque. 
One  polished  young  gentleman  of  our  own  time  has  been  credited 
with  the  profound  critical  observation  that  Jesus’  turning  water 
into  wine  at  the  wedding  in  Cana  of  Galilee  was  inspired  by  his 
wish  to  save  his  hostess  from  her  temporary  embarrassment — 
Jesus  was,  in  short;  the  perfect  guest  and  the  polished  ladies’  man 
at  the  hostess’s  right  hand  by  the  tea  table.  Another  and  more 
virile  college  boy,  who  brought  home  from  France  an  army  boxing 
championship,  has  told  us  that  whatever  else  might  be  true  of 
Jesus  he  certainly  would  take  an  interest  in  amateur  boxing,  and 
would  give  good  measure  of  time  to  the  squared  circle  and  the 
gloves. 

The  subjective  quality  in  the  appeal  to  the  authority  of  Jesus 
which  is  not  sensed  in  the  case  of  the  great  scholars,  and  which  is 
usually  entirely  unsuspected  in  ourselves,  becomes  humorously 
patent  in  the  case  of  the  ladies’  man  and  the  boxing  champion. 
The  whole  record  reveals  one  fact  and  one  only,  that  the  historical 
figure  of  Jesus,  his  life  and  teaching,  so  far  from  being  free  from 
the  need  of  interpretation,  seem  to  compel  the  introduction  of  this 
whole  subjective  factor. 

Schweitzer  says  of  this  century  of  effort  to  arrive  at  and  to 
establish  a  final  center  of  Christian  authority  in  the  person  of 
Jesus  that:  “The  critical  study  of  the  life  of  Jesus  has  been  for 
theology  a  school  of  honesty.  The  world  has  never  seen  before 
and  it  will  never  see  again  a  struggle  for  truth  so  full  of  pain  and 
renunciation  as  that  of  which  the  lives  of  Jesus  of  the  last  hundred 
years  contain  the  cryptic  record.”  But  this  quest  was  not  a 
struggle  for  truth  in  any  dispassionate  sense  of  the  word.  It  was  a 
discipline  in  intellectual  sincerity  and  moral  courage.  It  was  a  test 
of  men’s  creative  spiritual  resourcefulness  rather  than  an  occasion 
for  their  imitative  tendencies.  For  it  is  perfectly  clear  that  there 
never  has  been  and  never  can  be  an  “imitation”  of  Jesus,  pure  and 
simple.  Every  relationship  to  him  must  take  the  form  of  a  per¬ 
sonal  experiment  and  adventure. 

The  nature  of  our  problem  and  a  clue  as  to  the  nature  of  its 
answer  is  given  us  when  we  leave  the  field  of  criticism  and  appeal 
directly  to  our  own  experience  in  the  world  of  men.  The  figure  of 
Jesus  is  used  to-day  as  a  religious  sanction  for  every  conceivable 

32 


JESUS  AND  RELIGIOUS  AUTHORITY 

type  of  thought  and  conduct.  The  facts  of  the  gospel  are  too  com¬ 
plex  to  lend  themselves  to  any  single  type  of  character  or  society 
to  the  exclusion  of  all  other  moral  variants.  Each  man  gathers 
out  of  the  record  what  is  congenial  to  his  own  nature  and  cir¬ 
cumstance  and  then  reconstructs  a  figure  from  whom  he  draws 
authority  for  his  own  living.  Only  those  facts  live  for  us  which 
life  has  made  probable  and  vital  in  advance.  The  Jesus  of  one  man 
is  essentially  a  conservative,  centered  on  the  jot  and  the  tittle. 
The  Jesus  of  another  man  is  a  radical,  subjecting  the  Sabbath  and 
all  other  human  institutions  to  his  own  transvaluation.  The  Jesus 
of  this  man  is  a  militarist  behind  the  guns  or  urging  the  bayonet 
home  to  its  destination.  The  Jesus  of  another  is  a  pacifist,  serving 
his  time  in  Wormwood  Scrubs  or  Leavenworth.  The  gospels 
record  both  the  scourge  of  small  cords  and  the  nonresistance  of 
the  cross.  It  is  hard  to  reconcile  them  and  each  man  chooses  what 
bears  out  his  own  predisposition.  The  Jesus  of  one  is  a  churchman, 
who  goes  into  the  synagogue  as  is  his  custom.  The  Jesus  of  another 
is  a  free  lance,  tilting  at  the  whited  sepulchers  of  ecclesiasticism. 
To  the  family  man  Jesus  is  the  hallower  of  marriage,  to  the  priest 
he  is  the  pattern  of  celibacy.  The  total  impression  of  the  gospels 
is  that  of  a  character  too  catholic  and  free,  too  deep  and  too  broad, 
to  be  monopolized  by  any  of  our  narrow  working  categories  of 
creed  or  conduct,  but  lending  himself  in  part  to  all. 

What  there  is  of  authority  in  this  figure  comes  not  as  a  clear, 
final,  sufficient  statement  of  the  things  men  are  to  believe  and 
to  do,  but  as  a  stimulus  to  freedom  and  a  source  of  unfailing 
spiritual  energy.  The  drift  of  Christian  experience  has  been 
steadily  and  increasingly  in  the  direction  of  the  inner  conviction, 
away  from  the  outward  precept.  That  is  what  is  significant  about 
the  whole  story.  Our  last  center  of  authority,  this  person  of  the 
historical  Jesus,  while  promising  more,  seems  as  a  matter  of  actual 
fact  to  have  achieved  less  than  any  of  its  predecessors  in  estab¬ 
lishing  its  claim  to  external  sufficiency. 

But  it  is  for  that  very  reason  that  the  person  of  the  historical 
Jesus  stands  as  the  best  the  Christian  mind  has  done  to  define  its 
conception  of  authority,  not  merely  because  its  standard  is  higher 
than  that  of  ecclesiasticism  and  the  total  Bible,  but  because  it 
forces  the  soul  seeking  for  assurance  on  to  the  only  permanent 
certainty  which  religion  knows  or  ever  can  know,  what  Carlyle 

33 


THE  DISCIPLINES  OF  LIBERTY 


has  nobly  called  “the  fixed  indubitable  certainty  of  experience.” 
An  English  novelist  writes:  “A  man’s  religion  is  not  something 
without  any  definite  connection  with  his  own  life.  It  is  the  answer 
to  the  questions  that  have  been  put  to  him  and  not  to  other  men.” 
Not  only  so,  but  if  a  man’s  religion  is  to  be  his  own  in  any  vital 
sense,  the  answers  to  life’s  questions,  as  well  as  the  questions 
themselves,  must  be  his  own. 

The  effort  to  get  someone  else  to  answer  life’s  problems  for  us, 
whether  that  someone  else  be  the  Roman  Curia  or  the  author  of 
the  Book  of  Judges  or  even  Jesus  himself,  is  an  essentially  irre¬ 
ligious  effort.  A  man’s  religion,  of  all  his  possessions,  ought  to  be 
his  own.  And  what  is  wanting  in  the  whole  effort  to  establish  a 
seat  of  external  authority  is  the  willingness  to  learn  of  life  itself, 
which  is  the  true  hall-mark  of  a  disciple.  It  would  be  very  pleasant 
and  very  easy  if  we  might  find  some  principle  of  authority  which 
should  relieve  us  of  the  splendid  and  tragic  necessity  of  having  to 
live  our  spiritual  lives  for  ourselves.  But  that  would  be  a  sacrifice 
of  the  central  quality  of  all  true  religious  experience,  and  it  would 
be  a  blindness  to  the  cumulative  witness  drawn  from  the  history 
of  the  several  tentative  authorities  in  Christian  history.  For  that 
witness  points  only  in  one  direction,  to  the  steady  increment  of  the 
inner  and  subjective  contribution  to  religion’s  imperiousness. 

George  Tyrrell  said  all  that  can  be  said  on  this  whole  matter 
when  he  said  that  life  itself  is  the  only  schoolmaster  that  leads 
us  to  Christ.  There  is  no  way  of  making  spiritually  good  the  claim 
of  Jesus  to  our  devotion  and  discipleship  other  than  the  response 
which  has  its  origin  in  our  own  experience.  The  person  of  the  his¬ 
torical  Jesus  is  authoritative  for  us  only  in  so  far  as  it  interprets 
and  reinforces  the  teaching  and  discipline  of  life.  His  authority 
carried  permanent  weight  in  his  own  time  only  with  those  few 
whose  natures  were  fitted  to  respond  to  his  call.  He  refused  to  sum¬ 
mon  his  legion  of  angels  to  make  good  that  authority  on  some  basis 
other  than  the  subjective  basis.  He  left  the  problem  of  authority 
where  it  must  finally  rest,  with  the  character  of  the  disciple,  “He 
that  hath  ears  to  hear,  let  him  hear.”  The  Inquisition  may  torture 
the  heretic  in  the  name  of  authority,  Calvin  may  burn  Servetus, 
the  Puritans  may  hang  the  Quakers  on  Boston  Common,  modern 
states  may  sentence  nonresisters  to  hard  labor  in  the  name  of 
the  Jesus  of  the  scourge  of  cords,  departments  of  justice  may 

34 


JESUS  AND  RELIGIOUS  AUTHORITY 

prosecute  Communists  in  the  name  of  Jesus  who  had  no  property, 
but  these  familiar  and  outworn  resorts  add  nothing  to  the  real 
solution  of  the  problem  of  religious  authority;  they  are  expedients 
of  the  powers  that  be. 

What  finally  strikes  the  student  of  the  gospels  is  the  fact  that 
Jesus  withheld  the  pressure  of  all  temporal  argument  and  force 
that  he  might  let  his  authority  rest  from  the  first  where  at  last  it 
must  rest,  in  the  response  of  the  believing  soul.  One  thing  he  was 
not,  he  was  not  a  rule  maker.  He  was  a  contagion  of  enthusiasm, 
a  well  of  water  springing  up  unto  everlasting  life — but  what 
ethical  machinery  the  fires  of  his  enthusiasm  were  to  turn  and 
what  viaducts  were  to  be  laid  across  history  from  the  undying 
springs  of  his  character  he  did  not  specify.  He  seems  only  to  have 
feared  lest  in  becoming  an  Example  he  cease  to  be  an  Inspirer. 

And  it  is  not  far  away  to  suppose,  where  Christians  are  still 
mired  in  deep  misunderstanding  and  recrimination,  each  claiming 
the  authority  of  Jesus  for  ways  of  thought  and  conduct  mutually 
exclusive,  that  he  himself  stands  outside  both,  and  in  some  meas¬ 
ure  comprehending  both.  In  so  far  as  the  nature  of  his  Father  was 
his  entire  nature,  the  dayspring  of  his  gospel  still  rises  on  all  those 
who  are  trying  to  conduct  their  moral  affairs  on  the  presumption 
that  our  tentative  distinctions  between  the  just  and  the  unjust 
are  ultimate  moral  realities.  The  final  moral  energy  of  Jesus  lies, 
in  some  measure,  in  that  quality  of  him  which  is  “beyond  good 
and  evil,”  at  least  beyond  our  imperfect  and  tentative  measure  of 
good  and  evil.  This  is  simply  to  say  that  Jesus  belongs  far  more  to 
the  world  of  religion  than  to  the  world  of  ethics. 

We  find  ourselves  thus  driven  by  the  comparative  study  of  the 
efforts  to  recover  the  historical  Jesus,  and  by  a  simple  glance  at 
the  facts  of  our  total  Christian  thought  and  conduct  to-day,  to 
the  conclusion  that  the  forced  option  between  the  Jesus  of  history* 
and  the  Christ  of  the  creeds  embodies  a  fallacy.  For  the  two  are 
one.  There  never  has  been,  there  cannot  be,  a  Jesus  of  history 
apart  from  some  Christ  of  the  creeds,  that  is,  some  translation 
of  the  one  into  the  other.  The  case  of  Jesus  must  always  rest  upon 
interpretation  rather  than  upon  imitation.  This  modern  Christ 
may  not  be  the  Christ  of  any  historically  recognizable  creed,  but 
he  will  be  none  the  less  qualitatively  identical.  Richard  Watson 
Gilder  cannot  worship  some  other  man’s  dim  thought  of  Christ. 

35 


THE  DISCIPLINES  OF  LIBERTY 


But  he  cannot  escape  from  his  own  thought  of  Christ  to  some 
Jesus  about  whom  he  has  no  advance  opinions  and  ideas.  And  were 
he  to  find  such  a  dispassionate,  arbitrary  and  external  authority, 
in  the  very  nature  of  the  case  he  could  not  consent  to  it.  For  the 
spiritual  government  of  Jesus  rests  upon  the  consent  of  the 
governed,  and  it  is  that  consent  which  creates  his  authority. 

We  must  grant,  then,  that  the  effort  of  a  simple  and  devoted 
piety  in  our  time  to  define  Christianity  and  to  establish  its  au¬ 
thority  as  an  answer  to  the  question,  “What  would  Jesus  do?”  is 
doomed  to  failure.  The  plain  answer  to  this  question  in  nine  out  of 
ten  of  life’s  practical  crises  is,  “We  do  not  know  what  Jesus  would 
do.”  We  know  what  his  principles  are,  we  sense  the  outlines  of  his 
character,  but  just  what  they  mean  in  any  single  tangled  and  com¬ 
plex  situation  before  us  the  gospels  do  not  tell  us. 

Does  Jesus  stand  for  the  forty-four-hour  week  in  the  mills  as 
against  the  forty-eight-hour  week?  If  he  stands  for  the  former 
does  he  stand  for  the  candid  demand  for  only  a  four-  or  five-hour 
working  day?  Has  he  anything  to  say  on  the  problem  of  interest? 
What  dividends  may  a  Christian  accept  on  his  money  investments? 
Is  a  four  per  cent  dividend  Christian  and  a  ten  per  cent  dividend 
unchristian?  What  would  the  attitude  of  Jesus  be  toward  the 
problem  of  modern  citizenship  and  statesmanship?  Could  he  align 
himself  with  any  party?  If  so,  which  party?  And  if  with  no  party, 
how  would  he  relate  himself  to  the  Caesars  of  our  day?  Would  he 
preach,  as  Paul  and  Peter  preached,  the  duty  of  obedience  to  the 
powers  that  be,  or  would  he  preach,  with  Thoreau,  the  duty  of 
civil  disobedience?  What  would  be  his  attitude  toward  so  simple  a 
question  as  that  of  Sunday  observance?  Would  he  be  a  defender 
of  the  Puritan  blue  laws  or  a  spokesman  for  the  continental  Sun¬ 
day?  What  about  our  amusements?  Would  he  sanction  the  theater, 
and  if  so  where  would  he  draw  the  moral  line  between  his  approval 
and  his  disapproval?  Would  he  be  interested  in  the  problem  of 
eugenics,  and  what  would  he  have  to  say  of  the  shifting  concep¬ 
tions  of  the  sex  relationships? 

These  are  the  practical  problems  which  the  average  Christian 
faces  to-day.  His  daily  life  brings  them  all  to  him  as  the  raw 
stuff  out  of  which,  by  his  choice,  he  is  to  fashion  his  Christian 
character.  And  yet  even  the  most  simple  and  pious  soul — the 
“anima  naturaliter  Christiana ”■ — reads  and  rereads  his  gospels  in 

36 


JESUS  AND  RELIGIOUS  AUTHORITY 

vain  for  any  authoritative  utterance  upon  these  concrete  moral 
options.  He  turns  soberly  away  from  the  gospels  with  the  mature 
conviction  that  he  must  answer  these  questions  for  himself,  that 
the  historical  Jesus  will  not  relieve  him  of  the  privileges  and  re¬ 
sponsibilities  of  his  human  freedom. 

Perhaps  Jesus  never  intended  to  relieve  us  of  the  great  human 
obligation  of  moral  liberty.  Perhaps  the  Apostolic  Age  was  right 
when  it  felt  that  it  was  never  more  free  and  more  responsible  than 
in  the  moment  of  its  inner  experience  of  Christ.  Perhaps  Paul  was 
right  when  he  said  that  God  works  in  history  only  through  those 
who  work  out  their  own  salvation  with  fear  and  trembling.  If  that 
be  so,  then  the  whole  quest  for  an  external  authority  is  based  upon 
a  misconception  of  the  religious  life,  and  has  about  it  the  fears 
which  are  born  of  inexperience  and  immaturity. 

The  nineteenth  century  not  only  dissipated  the  Christ  of  the 
creeds,  it  did  what  it  least  intended  to  do,  it  overshot  the  Jesus 
of  history  whom,  in  Schweitzer’s  words,  it  hoped  to  bring  direct 
into  our  own  time  as  a  teacher  and  leader.  It  could  not  escape 
from  the  logic  of  the  quest  for  authority  which  increasingly  has 
led  us  home  to  present  experience  itself. 

It  may  be  expedient  for  our  time,  as  it  was  expedient  for 
another  remote  generation,  that  our  historical  Jesus  shall  go  away. 
That  may  be  the  only  way  in  which  we  can  discover  our  true  rela¬ 
tion  to  him.  For  the  moment  when  we  cease  to  use  him  as  a  pattern 
to  be  woodenly  imitated,  or  as  a  dictator  to  be  blindly  obeyed,  is 
the  moment  when  we  discover  what  he  really  means  to  us.  The 
simplest  definition  of  Jesus  which  the  world  has  ever  known  is 
that  which  designates  him  as  the  Friend  of  Man.  Men  to  whom 
the  title  Messiah  means  nothing,  men  to  whom  the  Logos  Chris- 
tology  of  the  Greek  fathers  is  a  riddle,  can  still  understand  what 
Jesus  is  as  a  Friend. 

For  what  is  the  definition  of  a  friend,  and  what  is  the  function 
of  friendship?  The  relation  between  friends  is  not  that  between 
a  teacher  and  a  pupil,  between  the  pattern  and  the  copy.  It  is  in 
some  measure  a  relation  of  equals.  And  it  is  to  such  equality  that 
the  mind  of  Jesus  is  always  leading  the  disciple.  “Henceforth  I 
call  you  not  servants,  but  I  have  called  you  friends.” 

There  was  gathered  in  Concord  a  half  century  and  more  ago, 
a  little  group  of  men  who  had  brought  the  sacrament  of  friendship 

37 


THE  DISCIPLINES  OF  LIBERTY 


to  a  high  point  of  perfection.  What  was  characteristic  of  that 
circle  was  the  quickened  individuality  of  each  member.  The  sig¬ 
nificant  thing  about  friendship  to  them  was  not  its  imitative  ten¬ 
dencies,  but  the  sting  to  sincerity  and  freedom  which  they  found 
in  their  high  comradeship.  “A  friend,”  says  Emerson,  “is  a  person 
before  whom  I  may  be  sincere.”  “A  friend,”  adds  Thoreau,  taking 
up  the  tale,  “never  descends  to  particulars  but  advises  by  his 
whole  behavior.” 

The  friendship  of  the  disciple  with  his  Master  is  not  other  in 
kind  than  all  our  human  friendships  at  their  best.  The  initial  fact 
of  every  man’s  relation  to  Jesus  is  the  fact  that  when  he  thinks  of 
Jesus  he  not  only  may  be  sincere,  he  must  be  sincere.  The  central 
compulsion  which  Jesus  lays  upon  us  is  to  be  our  deepest  and 
truest  selves.  The  historical  Jesus  does  npt  suffer  us  to  practice 
the  self-deceptions,  the  social  conventions  which  pass  as  the  coin 
of  common  life.  He  is  the  world’s  prover  of  the  thoughts  of  many 
hearts,  history’s  perpetual  challenge  to  moral  and  intellectual 
integrity.  In  his  presence,  as  we  read  the  gospels,  we  know  our¬ 
selves,  for  better  and  for  worse,  as  we  truly  are.  Jesus  is  the 
touchstone  of  the  realities  of  character.  He  is  the  sting  and  spur 
to  inner  truthfulness.  The  half-gods  are  content  with  less  than 
our  true  selves,  and  will  accept  the  conventional  time  service 
that  we  render.  Jesus  is  the  son  of  the  whole- God  who  challenges 
us  perpetually  to  dare  to  be  ourselves  and  to  take  the  consequences 
of  that  tremendous  courage. 

And  then  the  modern  disciple  still  draws  direct  from  Jesus  what 
he  draws  from  every  real  friend — that  potent  counsel  which  comes 
from  the  whole  character,  rather  than  moral  instruction  given  line 
upon  line.  How  often  in  our  human  perplexities  do  we  go  to  some 
friend  with  our  burden  of  anxiety  and  indecision,  hoping  that  he 
will  shrive  us  of  the  great  liabilities  of  freedom,  wishing  him  to 
solve  our  problem  for  us.  And  yet  in  the  moment  of  our  going  we 
know  that  we  go  in  vain.  And  when  we  leave  the  friend,  if  he  be 
a  true  friend,  we  bring  away  with  us  what  our  better  selves 
already  had  anticipated,  not  advice,  but  courage,  hope,  new 
strength  to  live  our  own  lives.  Our  friend  serves  us  not  by  the 
exercise  of  a  vicarious  wisdom,  but  by  the  subtler  and  more 
potent  ministry  of  sympathy  which  replenishes  the  reservoirs  of 
our  own  power. 


38 


JESUS  AND  RELIGIOUS  AUTHORITY 

It  is  not  otherwise  with  the  great  Friendship  that  the  disciple 
has  with  Jesus.  What  we  draw  from  the  thought  of  Jesus  is 
spiritual  strength.  And  that  is  what  we  need.  The  central  problem 
of  the  religious  life  is  the  problem  of  power,  not  of  moral  ways 
and  means.  Jesus  stands  in  the  history  of  religion  to  meet  that 
major  need,  not  to  arbitrate  its  minor  difficulties.  “Again  and 
again,5’  said  Tyrrell,  “I  have  been  tempted  to  give  up  the  struggle, 
but  always  the  figure  of  that  strange  man  hanging  on  his  cross 
sends  me  back  to  my  task  again.”  The  gospels  are  not  the  place 
where  the  free  sons  of  God  may  resort  to  the  Virgilian  lot  to  settle 
the  practical  problems  which  arise  in  the  exercise  of  liberty.  They 
are  the  storehouse  of  that  liberty,  and  the  seat  of  Christian  energy. 
They  stand  there  to  emancipate  us,  not  to  coerce  us.  The  felt 
imperiousness  of  the  historical  character  of  Jesus  lies  in  this 
constant  suggestion  of  a  morally  inexhaustible  reservoir  of  spirit¬ 
ual  energy  upon  which  he  who  will  may  draw  in  the  time  of  his 
need.  Out  of  weakness  we  become,  in  the  comradeship  of  Jesus, 
strong  in  ourselves.  And  that,  the  New  Testament  seems  to  say 
from  first  to  last,  is  what  Jesus  desired  for  us. 

It  will  be  perfectly  apparent  from  such  an  interpretation  of  the 
authority  of  Jesus  that  he  stands  in  human  imagination  and  devo¬ 
tion  in  an  essentially  mediatorial  position.  He  points  the  human 
soul  beyond  himself  to  God.  All  that  has  been  said  of  the  person 
of  Jesus  as  the  Friend  of  Man  may  be  said  and  must  be  said  of 
God.  God  is  the  ultimate  Friend  of  Man  and  any  Christianity 
which  stops  short  of  this  destiny  of  all  true  devotion  fails  to  honor 
Jesus  and  falls  short  of  true  religion. 

Christian  theology  at  its  best  has  always  had  the  courage  of 
this  fearless  conviction  as  to  the  final  meanings  of  the  character 
of  Christ.  No  false  loyalty  to  the  Jesus  of  history,  no  overjealous 
doctrine  of  the  Trinity  has  ever  stayed  the  homing  soul  of  man, 
once  come  to  itself  and  faced  about  to  go  unto  its  Father.  Of  the 
finished  work  of  Jesus  in  history,  his  earliest  great  interpreter 
said,  “Then  cometh  the  end,  when  he  shall  have  delivered  up  the 
Kingdom  to  God,  even  his  Father  .  .  .  that  God  may  be  all  in 
all.”  When  Jesus  shall  have  led  his  disciples  to  that  mature 
moment  in  which  they  realize  their  eternal  friendship  with  God 
his  task  is  fulfilled  in  the  mutual  experience  whereby  our  life  “is 
hid  with  Christ  in  God.” 


39 


THE  DISCIPLINES  OF  LIBERTY 


Meantime,  to  us  groping  in  the  far  countries  of  our  perplexity 
and  wastrel  sonship,  Jesus  is  history’s  best  sign  and  pledge  of  the 
character  of  God.  “The  Christian  religion,”  writes  Josiah  Royce, 
“is,  thus  far,  man’s  most  impressive  vision  of  salvation  and  his 
principal  glimpse  of  the  homeland  of  the  spirit.”  This  vision  is  in 
part  the  vision  of  the  ultimate  beloved  community.  But  it  is  also 
our  prophetic  intuition  of  the  nature  of  him  who  keeps  that  home¬ 
land.  Frederick  W.  H.  Myers  was  once  questioned,  “If  you  could 
ask  the  Sphinx  one  question,  and  only  one,  what  would  that  ques¬ 
tion  be?”  And  Myers  replied,  “If  I  could  ask  the  Sphinx  one  ques¬ 
tion,  and  one  only,  and  hope  for  an  answer,  I  think  the  question 
would  be  this,  Is  the  Universe  friendly?”  In  the  midst  of  the 
unfriendliness  of  nature  and  man’s  inhumanity  to  man,  this  is 
the  problem  which  challenges  all  modern  religion.  The  historical 
figure  of  Jesus  and  the  perennial  power  of  the  character  of  Christ 
owe  their  appeal  to  the  suggested  answer  to  this  question.  Chris¬ 
tian  theology  has  been,  in  its  making,  essentially  inductive  and 
empirical  in  method.  All  perversions  of  this  method  to  the  con¬ 
trary,  Christian  thought  does  not  start  with  a  rigid  premise  as  to 
the  nature  of  God,  and  force  Jesus  into  some  hard  category  of 
divinity.  Christian  thought  begins  with  the  benevolences  of 
common  life  which  no  minor  pessimism  can  deny,  and  advances 
from  them, 

The  charities  that  soothe,  and  heal,  and  bless, 

Are  scattered  at  the  feet  of  Man — like  flowers. 

The  generous  inclination,  the  just  rule, 

Kind  wishes  and  good  actions,  and  pure  thoughts — 

No  mystery  is  here!  Here  is  no  boon 

For  high  nor  yet  for  low;  for  proudly  graced — 

Yet  not  for  meek  of  heart.  The  smoke  ascends 
To  heaven  as  lightly  from  the  cottage  hearth 
As  from  the  haughtiest  palace.  He  whose  soul 
Ponders  this  true  equality,  may  walk 
The  fields  of  earth  with  gratitude  and  hope. 

To  these  initial  pledges  of  the  ultimate  friendliness  of  the 
Mystery,  Christianity  in  the  fullness  of  human  experience  adds  its 
vision  of  the  character  of  Jesus:  “He  that  hath  seen  me  hath 
seen  the  Father.”  No  man,  Jesus  least  of  all  men,  stands  apart 
from  the  homeland  of  the  human  soul,  whence  we  all  come 
and  to  which  we  all  return.  Our  devotion  to  him  is  merely  our 

40 


JESUS  AND  RELIGIOUS  AUTHORITY 

consent  to  the  clearest  of  all  those  earnests  of  nature  and  history 
which  give  us  courage  to  believe  that  the  Universe  is  friendly,  that 
the  Veiled  Being  is  no  passionless  object  of  our  unrequited  desire, 
but  is  in  verv  truth  the  Eternal  Goodness.  It  is  to  all  such 
farther  and  final  considerations  that  the  authority  of  Jesus  leads 
the  human  mind  on  into  the  central  energy  of  all  religion,  man’s 
friendship  with  God. 

It  is  expedient  for  us,  therefore,  that  all  centers  of  external 
authority  shall  pass  away.  For  only  by  their  passing  can  we  enter 
into  “the  fixed  indubitable  certainty  of  experience”  where  the 
power  of  religion  is  finally  vested.  There  is  no  inherent  reason  why 
the  disciple  who  has  been  led  onward  to  the  Inner  Light  may  not 
evidence  in  his  discipleship  that  authority  which  has  been  im¬ 
perfectly  exercised  by  other  claimants.  He  will  make  his  errors, 
for  all  truth  is  not  given  to  him,  or  to  his  generation  in  advance. 
But  the  constant  testing  of  his  sincerity  of  thought  and  purpose  in 
the  presence  of  the  Friend  of  Man,  and  the  unfailing  access  of 
counsel  which  comes  from  the  total  character  of  Christ  will  lead 
him  more  and  more  into  that  truth  where  Jesus  lives,  the  finisher 
of  our  faith,  as  he  was  its  historical  author. 

“He  comes  to  us  as  one  unknown  without  a  name,  as  of  old,  by 
the  lake-side,  He  came  to  those  who  knew  Him  not.  He  speaks  to 
us  the  same  word,  ‘Follow  thou  me!  ’  and  sets  us  to  the  tasks  which 
He  has  to  fulfill  for  our  time.  He  commands.  And  to  those  who 
obey  Him,  whether  they  be  wise  or  simple,  He  will  reveal  Himself 
in  the  toils,  the  conflicts,  the  sufferings  which  they  shall  pass 
through  in  His  fellowship,  and,  as  an  ineffable  mystery,  they  shall 
learn  in  their  own  experience  who  He  is.”* 

*  “The  Quest  of  the  Historical  Jesus,”  Schweitzer,  p.  401. 


41 


CHAPTER  III. 


Christian  History  and  Dogma 
as  Autobiography. 


(  ( 


HE  human  heart,”  says  John  Calvin,  “is  a  perpetual 
forge  of  idols.”  Our  Western  World  cherishes  a  super¬ 
cilious  contempt  for  the  heathen  who  in  his  blindness 
bows  down  to  wood  and  stone.  As  Gibbon  in  Rome  allowed  him¬ 
self  a  furtive  glance  at  her  monuments  of  superstition,  so  the 
tourist  in  Japan  deigns  a  visit  to  the  Buddha  at  Kamakura.  But 
in  his  heart  of  hearts  he  thanks  God  that  he  is  not  as  those 
idolaters. 

If  Calvin  be  right,  however,  idolatry  cannot  be  so  easily  and 
cheaply  abjured.  For  wood  and  brass  are  not  the  only  vehicles 
through  which  an  idolatrous  spirit  expresses  itself.  The  idols  of 
the  clan,  the  market  place,  the  forum,  and  the  pulpit  may  be  as 
potent  as  the  graven  images  of  the  alleged  heathen.  The  gospel 
of  “brass  tacks”  is  as  much  an  idolatry  as  the  gospel  of  Gautama, 
and  a  good  deal  more  so.  As  a  matter  of  simple  aesthetic  judg¬ 
ment,  brass  tacks  are  vastly  inferior  to  jade  Buddhas  as  an  object 
of  veneration.  And  it  is  a  fair  question  whether  our  commercial 
materialism  has  really  achieved  any  moral  and  spiritual  advance 
by  substituting  its  brass  tacks  for  the  saints  of  yesterday  and  the 
gods  of  the  nations.  In  other  words,  a  man  does  not  have  to  bow 
down  to  some  image  of  an  anthropomorphic  deity  to  be  an 
idolatrous  heathen.  He  needs  only  to  worship  at  the  sign  of  the 
dollar,  or  any  other  crude  material  value,  to  set  going  again  the 
idol  forge  in  the  human  soul. 

There  are  two  great  idolatries  in  contemporary  Christianity 
from  which  the  free  man  may  pray  to  be  emancipated.  One  is  the 
idolatry  of  fact.  The  other  is  the  idolatry  of  system.  These  two 
idols  stand  between  the  seeker  and  the  Reality  to  obstruct  his 

42 


HISTORY  AND  DOGMA 


vision  of  Truth.  Each  of  them  has  a  certain  validity  as  a  symbol 
of  Reality.  Yet  the  symbol  has  found  such  acceptance  in  the 
modern  mind  that  the  Reality  is  in  constant  danger  of  being  ob¬ 
scured  and  forgotten,  while  the  symbol  usurps  for  itself  the 
values  and  prerogatives  of  Reality.  When  this  subtle  but  radical 
change  takes  place,  when  fact  and  system  thrust  themselves  into 
the  foreground  as  the  objects  of  our  worship,  they  make  idolaters 
of  us.  For  a  fact  may  be  as  wooden  as  a  totem  pole,  and  a  system 
as  inhuman  and  impersonal  as  Moloch,  and  neither  of  them  has 
of  itself  any  life-giving  power. 

The  veneration  of  fact  is  a  by-product  of  the  scientific  spirit. 
At  its  best,  modern  science  is  essentially  religious  in  its  temper 
and  leadings.  But  in  its  uninspired,  chronic  form  it  may  sink  into 
an  idolatry  pure  and  simple;  a  worship  of  information,  of  dates, 
names  and  places.  In  this  debased  form  its  ark  of  the  covenant  is 
a  card  catalogue,  its  holy  of  holies  a  reference  library,  its  sacred 
scriptures  an  encyclopaedia,  its  priests  and  Levites  our  modem 
academic  pedants. 

Contemporary  Christianity,  invaded  and  overcome  by  the  scien¬ 
tific  spirit,  has  failed  to  sense  what  is  essentially  noble  and  deeply 
religious  in  the  major  prophecies  of  science  at  its  best,  but  has 
accepted  without  question  its  minor  prophecy  of  fact.  In  religion 
this  has  meant  the  elevation  of  the  historical  method  to  a  prestige 
that  for  the  moment  is  unchallenged.  This  method  as  it  is  now  in 
vogue  is  primarily  a  quest  for  the  naked  event,  the  uninterpreted 
actuality. 

In  particular  the  Bible,  and  in  general  all  religious  history,  have 
been  subjected  to  this  process.  In  our  Bible,  as  it  stands,  there 
are  two  strands  twisted  so  tightly  as  to  give  at  first  sight  the  im¬ 
pression  of  a  single  uniform  stuff.  One  of  these  is  the  strand  of 
actual  happening.  The  other  is  the  strand  of  contemporaneous 
interpretation.  Prior  to  the  advent  of  the  historical  sciences  it 
never  occurred  to  the  Bible  reader  to  distinguish  between  the  two. 
He  identified  the  two.  The  main  contribution  which  the  historical 
study  of  the  Bible  has  made  to  religious  thought  is  its  unremitted 
effort  to  untwist  the  stuff  of  Scripture,  to  dissociate  the  event 
from  the  interpretation  placed  upon  the  event,  to  revise  or  to 
reject  altogether  the  strand  of  interpretation,  and  to  conserve  and 
stress  the  strand  of  fact. 


43 


THE  DISCIPLINES  OF  LIBERTY 


There  is  the  very  first  story  on  the  opening  page  of  Genesis, 
the  story  of  the  Creation.  The  religious  value  of  the  story  lies  not 
in  the  fact  as  it  was  then  comprehended,  but  in  the  interpretation 
of  the  fact.  What  were  then  held  to  be  the  facts  were  a  matter  of 
universal  knowledge  in  the  ancient  world.  The  superiority  of  the 
Genesis  narrative  over  the  non-Biblical  creation  myths  lies  in  the 
interpretation  of  the  fact  implied  from  the  first,  “In  the  beginning 
God.”  Modern  geology  and  astronomy  have  dug  down  through 
the  Genesis  narrative  to  a  deeper  stratum  of  physical  fact  than 
was  at  first  suspected.  But  they  have  withheld  spiritual  interpre¬ 
tation.  Tyrrell  sits  in  judgment  on  the  dispassionate  reign  of  fact 
over  the  modern  mind  when  he  says  of  the  issues  involved  in  any 
theory  of  creation: 

“If  our  astronomy  has  in  some  way  enlarged  it  has  also  im¬ 
poverished  our  notion  of  the  heavens.  It  has  given  us  quantitative 
mysteries  in  exchange  for  qualitative.  The  once  mysterious  planets, 
and  the  sun  itself,  are  but  material  orbs  like  our  own;  and  as  the 
mind  travels  endlessly  into  space  it  meets  only  with  more  orbs 
and  systems  of  orbs  in  their  millions,  an  infinite  monotony  of 
matter  and  motion,  but  never  does  it  strike  against  some  boundary 
wall  of  the  universe,  beyond  which  God  keeps  an  eternal  Sabbath 
in  a  new  order  of  existence,  a  mysterious  world  which  eye  has  not 
seen,  nor  ear  heard,  nor  heart  conceived.  The  heaven  that  lay 
behind  the  blue  curtain  of  the  sky,  whence  night  by  night  God 
hung  out  his  silver  lamps  to  shine  upon  the  earth,  was  a  far  deeper 
symbol  of  the  eternal  home  than  the  cold  and  shelterless  deserts 
of  astronomical  space.” 

We  moderns  may  be  nearer  the  bare  fact  than  the  writer  of  the 
Pentateuch.  But  the  uninterpreted  fact  is  even  less  potent  reli¬ 
giously  than  the  interpretation  of  the  facts  as  imperfectly  sensed 
so  long  ago. 

So  again,  there  is  no  reason  to  doubt  that  the  Hebrews  fleeing 
from  Egypt  availed  themselves  at  the  Red  Sea  of  some  abnormally 
slack  tide  which  laid  bare  a  passage  seldom  open.  That  seems  to 
have  been  the  fact.  But  we  feel  free  to  challenge  the  theory  of 
special  providence  which  was  used  to  interpret  the  fact  in  the  light 
of  our  general  conception  of  the  ways  of  God  in  nature.  What  the 
'bare  ground  in  the  bed  of  the  Red  Sea,  the  bare  fact  of  the  low 
tide,  means,  we  hesitate  to  say.  It  remains  for  us,  therefore,  merely 

44 


HISTORY  AND  DOGMA 


to  venerate  the  primitive  fact,  uninterpreted,  as  though  it  were 
of  itself  a  suggestive  and  life-giving  item  of  information. 

Likewise,  the  most  radical  critic  of  the  gospels  does  not  hesi¬ 
tate  to  say  that  in  the  stories  of  the  miracles,  particularly  the 
healing  of  mental  disorders,  there  is  a  solid  core  of  actuality.  But 
he  questions  the  theory  of  demoniacal  possession  by  which  the 
fact  was  then  interpreted.  There  is  no  reason  to  doubt  that  Jesus 
quieted  and  restored  to  its  normal  poise  the  mind  of  the  Gadarene 
demoniac.  But  that  he  effected  a  transfer  of  malign  personalities 
from  a  man’s  brain  to  the  brain  of  the  swine  is  a  doubtful  expla¬ 
nation  of  the  actuality.  Animals  sense  in  strange  ways  the  mental 
and  moral  tension  of  human  situations.  Perhaps  some  such  panic 
invaded  the  poor  beasts  of  Gadara.  The  interpretation  of  the 
event  is  still  an  open  question. 

The  severer  historical  methods  would,  indeed,  reserve  all  judg¬ 
ments  of  interpretation,  and  would  leave  the  naked  uninterpreted 
fact  standing  in  its  bare  actuality,  as  the  object  of  our  interest  and 
veneration.  Having  restored  to  us  the  event  as  it  was,  the  his¬ 
torian  implies,  usually,  that  he  has  done  his  perfect  work.  But  no 
mental  discipline  which  is  not  an  interpretation  of  life  can  hope 
permanently  to  claim  the  loyalty  of  the  human  mind.  The  facts 
which  history  restores  to  us,  if  uninterpreted,  may  become  as  life¬ 
less  and  morally  impotent  as  the  statues  in  the  niches  of  the 
cathedral.  And  the  time  must  come  when  the  cathedrals  of  modern 
information,  each  with  its  reredos  where  fact  is  piled  upon  fact, 
will  be  invaded  by  some  Cromwellian  impatience  of  the  human 
soul,  which  will  demolish  the  arrogant  fact  with  holy  frenzy,  will 
whitewash  the  walls  where  the  frescoes  of  systems  have  been 
drawn,  and  will  invite  the  human  soul  to  a  more  direct  worship  of 
Reality. 

William  Roscoe  Thayer,  writing  of  “History — Quick  or  Dead,” 
asserts  flatly  that: 

“Four  fifths  of  the  history  written  up  to  the  present  time  has 
been  dead.  .  .  .  The  worship  of  Fact,  which  must  not  be  con¬ 
founded  with  Truth,  does  not  lead  us  far.  To  know  that  Columbus 
discovered  America  on  October  12,  1492,  or  that  the  Declaration 
of  Independence  was  made  on  July  4,  1776,  or  that  Napoleon  lost 
the  battle  of  Waterloo  on  June  18,  1815,  is  interesting;  but  unless 
these  statements  are  reinforced  by  much  matter  of  a  different  kind, 

45 


THE  DISCIPLINES  OF  LIBERTY 


they  are  hardly  more  important  for  us  than  it  would  be  to  know 
the  number  of  leaves  on  a  tree.  And  this  is  true  though  the  facts  be 
indefinitely  multiplied.  I  have  read,  for  instance,  an  account  of 
the  American  Revolution  in  which  the  uncontroverted  facts  fol¬ 
lowed  each  other  in  as  impeccably  correct  a  sequence  as  the  tele¬ 
graph  poles  which  carry  the  wires  over  eight  hundred  and  fifty 
miles  of  the  desert  of  Gobi.  The  paramount  interest  in  this  case 
is  not  the  number  of  poles  but  the  purport  of  the  telegrams  flashed 
along  the  wires.  .  .  .  The  meaning  of  the  sequent  or  scattered 
events  in  any  historical  movement,  be  it  of  long  duration,  or 
merely  a  fleeting  episode — that  alone  can  have  significance  for  us.” 

Martineau  once  paid  his  scant  respects  to  those  persons  whom 
he  called  “archaeological  Christians.  .  .  .  There  may,  perhaps, 
be  logical  devotees  whose  enthusiasm  loves  to  reach  their  God  by 
long  and  painful  pilgrimages  of  thought;  but  it  would  not  be  a 
happy  thing  for  natures  of  more  direct  and  impatient  affection  to 
be  left  thus  dependent  for  knowledge  of  divine  things  on  literary, 
antiquarian,  philological  evidence,  judicially  balanced,  analogous 
to  that  which  scholars  cite  in  discussing  the  Homeric  poems,  or 
the  letters  of  Phalaris.”  Yet  that  is  the  method  which  has  domi¬ 
nated  the  religious  efforts  of  the  last  two  generations.  In  other 
days  Matthew,  Mark  and  Luke  and  John  were  importuned  to 
“bless  the  bed  that  I  lie  on.”  Nothing  has  been  gained  for  religion 
by  transferring  that  humble  office  to  the  personage  known  in 
gospel  research  as  “Q — the  Second  Source.”  The  modern  mind, 
however,  clings  with  a  fanatic  persistence  to  “the  blessed  Q,” 
saying,  “I  will  not  let  thee  go  except  thou  bless  me,”  but  somehow 
the  blessing  tarries. 

For  we  have  had  now  a  full  and  fair  half  century  in  our  liberal 
churches  of  the  working  of  the  historical  method  in  religion.  Our 
preaching  and  our  teaching  have  aimed  to  establish  correct  in¬ 
formation  as  to  the  essential  religious  facts,  and  to  relieve  those 
facts,  wherever  and  whatever  they  were,  of  the  liabilities  of  im¬ 
perfect  interpretation  by  which  their  true  outlines  were  obscured. 
There  has  been  in  the  scientific  treatment  of  fact  a  kind  of 
deification  of  nakedness,  and  an  impatience  of  the  fantastic 
fashions  of  thought  superimposed  by  past  interpreters. 

Yet  what  has  been  accomplished  by  the  deification  of  naked 
fact,  unclothed  upon  by  any  comment?  The  salvation  of  the  world 

46 


HISTORY  AND  DOGMA 


still  tarries.  In  commenting  upon  the  failure  of  our  whole  modern 
system  of  religious  education,  revealed  in  the  abysmal  ignorance 
of  the  average  British  soldier  as  to  the  simple  gospel  facts,  the 
members  of  the  English  symposium,  who  have  issued  a  report  on 
“The  Army  and  Religion,”  do  not  hesitate  to  say  that,  “The  nine¬ 
teenth  century  aimed  too  much  at  imparting  fact.  .  .  .  The  con¬ 
ception  of  education  as  an  endeavor  to  pack  the  mind  with  morally 
colorless  facts  has  done  untold  damage.  .  .  .  The  average  boy  gets 
to  detest  the  Bible  at  school  or  college,  as  its  historical  side  only 
is  thrust  upon  him.” 

What  is  needed  in  our  whole  contemporary  use  of  the  accredited 
body  of  Christian  fact  is  some  more  vital  theory  of  the  value  and 
use  of  history  than  that  which  has  been  in  vogue  among  the 
idolaters  of  fact.  We  need  the  prophetic  impatience  which  always 
struggles  to  get  away  from  “The  preposterous  Then  and  There” 
to  the  “Everlasting  Here  and  Now.”  The  most  significant  facts 
in  our  whole  religious  catena,  the  facts  about  Jesus,  are  impotent, 
as  we  have  seen,  without  the  subjective  contribution  made  by  the 
interpreter.  For  these  facts  about  Jesus  are  spiritually  impotent 
and  must  remain  so,  if  they  are  preached  and  taught  merely  as 
events  which  happened  two  thousand  years  ago.  Canon  Barnett 
trying  to  bring  the  gospel  of  Jesus  to  East  London  had  only  one 
conviction,  “Christ  is  a  present  Christ,  and  all  of  us  are  his 
contemporaries.” 

This  doctrine  of  the  contemporaneity  of  Christ  has  too  often 
been  looked  upon  in  our  time  as  a  dubious  mood  of  mystical  piety 
which  cannot  be  subjected  to  any  serious  critical  examination. 
But  in  reality,  this  characteristic  doctrine  of  the  Christian  reli¬ 
gion  that  Christ  is  always  present  with  the  disciple,  is  founded 
upon  the  only  theory  of  history  which  really  has  any  permanent 
worth.  It  is  the  theory  which  Emerson  has  indicated  and  roughed 
out  in  his  “Essay  on  History.”  Every  man,  Emerson  tells  us,  must 
realize  that  he  can  live  all  history  in  his  own  person.  History  is 
significant  not  because  it  is  the  story  of  what  happened  far  away 
and  long  ago  to  men  whose  names  have  resounded  far,  but  because 
it  is  the  story  of  what  is  happening  to  us  here  and  now.  A  man 
must  realize  that  he  lives  through  the  great  epochs  and  civiliza¬ 
tions  of  the  past  in  his  own  life,  that  just  as  the  human  being  in 
the  nine  months’  darkness  of  the  womb  is  said  to  review  and 

47 


THE  DISCIPLINES  OF  LIBERTY 


reincarnate  the  whole  process  of  physical  evolution,  so  the  wakened 
human  mind  and  heart  relive  the  past  in  present  conscious  ex¬ 
perience.  The  past  becomes  luminous  and  vital  when  it  is  a  com¬ 
mentary  upon  the  present.  A  man  should  realize  that  there  is  no 
such  thing  as  history,  there  is  only  biography,  autobiography. 
There  is  a  certain  touch  of  arrogance  in  the  Emersonian  attitude, 
which  more  timid  natures  do  not  understand.  The  iron  string  of 
Self-Reliance  is  set  vibrating  by  every  great  historic  fact.  But, 
nevertheless,  the  secret  of  a  true  reading  of  history  lies  with  this 
fearless  autobiographical  temper.  “Life,  evermore  Life,  is  the  im¬ 
perial  theme  for  those  who  live.” 

The  academic  mind  takes  us  out  onto  the  high  places  of  his¬ 
torical  vision  and  shows  us  its  Valley  of  Dead  Facts — “And  lo, 
they  are  very  many  and  they  are  very  dry!”  Nothing  short  of  the 
prophetic  touch  of  an  autobiographical  interpretation  can  clothe 
them  with  flesh  and  breathe  into  them  the  breath  of  life  and 
meaning.  The  touchstone  of  all  historical  values  is  to  be  found  in 
this  method  and  this  method  alone. 

Critics  of  Wordsworth  have  observed  that  the  so-called  panthe¬ 
ism  of  the  poet  is  not  really  a  recognition  of  God  in  nature  but 
the  discovery  of  self  in  nature.  It  is  Wordsworth’s  “homing  in¬ 
stinct”  in  the  presence  of  nature  which  gives  to  his  poetry  its 
perennial  power.  So  it  is  with  history  live  as  against  history  dead. 
What  gives  to  history  its  vitality  is  the  fearless  homing  instinct  of 
the  mind  which  does  not  hesitate  to  identify  the  past  fact  with 
the  present  experience. 

There  is  a  half-whimsical,  half-serious  passage  in  one  of  Mark 
Rutherford’s  novels  in  which  he  presses  this  method  to  its  limit. 
He  is  writing  of  a  little  town  in  the  English  Midlands — “Cowfold” 
— and  of  this  town  he  says: 

“The  Garden  of  Eden,  the  murder  of  Cain,  the  deluge,  the  sal¬ 
vation  of  Noah,  the  exodus  from  Egypt,  David  and  Bathsheba, 
with  the  murder  of  Uriah,  the  Assyrian  invasion,  the  Incarnation, 
the  Atonement,  the  Resurrection  from  the  dead;  to  say  nothing 
of  the  Decline  and  Fall  of  the  Roman  Empire,  the  tragedy  of 
Count  Cenci,  the  execution  of  Mary  Queen  of  Scots,  the  Inquisi¬ 
tion  in  Spain,  and  the  revolt  of  the  Netherlands,  all  happened  in 
Cowfold,  as  well  as  elsewhere,  and  were  perhaps  more  interesting 

48 


HISTORY  AND  DOGMA 

there  because  they  could  be  studied  in  detail  and  the  records  were 
authentic.” 

It  is  only  when  the  student  of  history  has  achieved  the  moral 
courage  to  prophesy  in  his  own  name  over  the  Valley  of  Dry 
Bones  which  makes  up  the  severely  scientific  presentation  of  his¬ 
torical  fact  that  he  stands  in  the  right  relation  to  those  facts.  He 
may  hesitate  to  overwork  the  hard  driven  dictum  that  history 
repeats  itself,  but  he  will  not  fail  to  sense  the  eternal  life  of  every 
fact  which  is  worth  remembering  an  hour  after  it  has  been  noted. 

No  false  modesty,  no  self-disparagement,  can  blind  us  to  the 
truth  that  what  gives  the  great  man  and  the  great  fact  power  over 
us  is  their  strange  gift  to  us  of  a  better  self-knowledge.  The  would- 
be  great  man  impresses  us  with  his  own  claim  to  greatness.  The 
truly  great  man  makes  us  feel  our  greatness.  No  historical  char¬ 
acter  or  event,  no  classic  in  literature,  can  escape  this  drastic 
autobiographical  test  to  which  subsequent  generations  subject 
them.  If  they  are  to  live  potently  in  memory,  they  live  not  because 
they  illuminate  remote  times  and  places,  but  because  they  irra¬ 
diate  the  life  of  the  present.  We  sense 

An  influence  from  the  earth  from  those  dead  hearts 
So  passionate  once,  so  deep,  so  truly  kind, 

That  in  the  living  child  the  spirit  starts, 

Feeling  companioned  still,  not  left  behind. 

And  it  is  the  measure  of  companionship  which  may  be  drawn 
direct  from  past  events  that  determines  the  true  worth  and  per¬ 
manence  of  any  historical  happening  or  any  human  classic. 

Out  of  the  welter  of  the  memories  of  the  War,  two  impressions 
still  linger  as  illustrations  of  the  autobiographical  test  which  alone 
proves  the  permanent  worth  of  the  classic  event  and  the  classic 
record  from  the  remote  past.  One  memory  is  that  of  a  presentation 
of  Euripides’  “Trojan  Women.”  The  play  was  written  in  415  B.  C. 
as  a  criticism  of  the  military  policy  of  Athens  and  as  a  human 
commentary  upon  all  wars.  It  uses  the  mythical  story  of  Troy  as 
its  text.  But  as  retold  in  our  own  time,  set  to  the  background  of 
the  recent  years,  all  sense  of  the  intervening  centuries  was  lost, 
and  the  play  became  modern  in  the  only  way  that  any  classic  can 
be  called  modern,  through  a  certain  eternal  fidelity  to  unchanging 
human  experience,  which  time  does  not  give  and  which  time, 

49 


THE  DISCIPLINES  OF  LIBERTY 


therefore,  cannot  take  away.  Helen  of  Troy  lived  again  as  the 
perennial  seduction  of  the  pride  of  life  and  the  lust  of  the  eye. 
Hecuba  was  simply  the  unchanging  lament  of  womanhood  in  all 
wars — “behold  and  see  if  there  be  any  sorrow  like  unto  my 
sorrow.”  The  boy  Astyanax  laid  at  the  last  dead  upon  Hector’s 
great  shield  was  the  childhood  of  all  time  immolated  upon  the 
altar  of  all  wars.  There  was  no  sense  of  historical  discrepancy  in 
the  poignant  cry  of  old,  the  voice  of  Belgium  and  Flanders  and 
Armenia  speaking  for  the  moment  in  the  thin  guise  of  Troy. 

Lo,  I  have  seen  the  open  hand  of  God; 

And  in  it  nothing,  nothing  save  the  rod 

Of  mine  affliction. 

So  long  as  there  shall  be  wars  and  rumors  of  war  upon  the  earth, 
the  marching  centuries  which  separate  us  farther  and  farther  from 
Euripides  will  never  make  his  imperious  tragedy  archaic  and  re¬ 
mote.  He  will  be  at  all  such  times  the  very  present  and  sufficient 
voice  of  suffering  womanhood  and  outraged  childhood,  the  rebel 
protest  of  all  realism.  Until  swords  have  been  beaten  irrevocably 
into  ploughshares,  “The  Trojan  Women”  stands  entirely  outside 
the  time  process. 

And  the  other  memory  is  that  of  a  symphony  concert  with 
Paderewski  as  the  assisting  artist.  With  the  orchestra  he  played 
some  long  concerto,  played  it  with  matchless  precision  and  tech¬ 
nique  but  without  any  suggestion  of  human  feeling.  The  audience 
would  not  let  him  go  but  called  him  back  once  more.  Again  he 
played,  this  time  alone  at  the  piano,  some  passionless  little  inven¬ 
tion,  given  with  adroitness  but  patently  without  heart.  The  audi¬ 
ence  began  to  break  up  and  drift  out  of  the  hall.  The  orchestra 
members  left  the  stage.  But  still  a  handful  lingered,  hoping  that 
the  man  might  break  through  the  armor  of  self-defense  which 
the  artist  had  put  on.  Once  more  he  came  back,  sat  down  at  the 
piano,  brooded  over  the  keys  in  wandering  chords  of  indecision, 
then  straightened  up  and  brought  down  both  hands  onto  the 
keyboard  in  the  tremendous  opening  chords  of  a  Chopin  Mili¬ 
tary  Polonaise.  All  sense  of  time  and  place  were  lost,  all  sense  of 
where  one  was  and  what  was  happening.  And  through  the  music 
of  a  century  gone,  once  more  come  into  its  own  in  history  and  at 
the  hand  of  a  master,  Chopin  sang  to  us  in  the  thunder  and  la- 

50 


HISTORY  AND  DOGMA 


ment  of  his  measures  the  tragedy  of  Poland.  For  the  first  citizen 
of  modern  Poland  at  the  piano,  for  those  whom  he  welcomed  into 
his  self-consciousness,  there  was  nothing  but  imperious  auto¬ 
biography — the  heroic  measures  of  yesterday  living  in  an  Eternal 
Here  and  Now.  It  was  the  voice  of  life  itself,  the  epic  of  humanity, 
the  minor  measures  of  “the  heavy  and  the  weary  weight  of  all 
this  unintelligible  world”  and  the  major  affirmation  of  “man’s 
unconquerable  mind.” 

From  this  ultimate  autobiographical  test  no  remote  fact,  no 
ancient  classic,  can  permanently  escape.  Every  record  of  the  past, 
every  voice  of  yesterday,  must  finally  submit  to  this  drastic  proving 
at  the  touchstone  of  the  living  spirit.  The  ancient  fact,  the  alien 
classic,  which  fail  to  serve  as  the  voice  of  the  present,  pass  away 
into  the  Nirvana  of  all  forgotten  things.  But  the  character,  the  epi¬ 
sode,  the  lyric,  the  drama,  which  still  help  men  to  understand 
themselves  and  which  say  for  men  in  noble  measures  what  by 
themselves  they  are  not  able  to  say,  live  on  imperiously  by  virtue 
of  their  own  inherent  immortal  life. 

This  is  the  subjective  test  carried  to  its  last  logical  conclusion. 
The  process  which  we  have  seen  at  work  in  the  interpretation  of 
the  historical  Jesus  is  the  process  by  which  all  historical  fact,  all 
letters  and  all  art  are  finally  accredited  or  discredited.  History  is 
simply  the  approved  body  of  permanent  autobiography  in  the 
experience  of  our  total  humanity.  All  else  is  pedantry,  archae¬ 
ology,  a  worship  of  the  dinosaur  and  the  dodo. 

Those  Concord  philosophers  pressed  the  premises  of  their  view 
of  life  to  quixotic  extreme.  They  caricatured  themselves.  But  they 
stood  free  of  the  obsession  of  dead  fact,  and  prophesied  over  the 
dry  bones  with  a  fearless  self-confidence  which  contemporary 
Christianity  would  do  well  to  covet.  In  his  memoir  of  Thoreau, 
Emerson  says  that  the  distinctive  quality  of  Thoreau’s  mind  was 
his  persistent  habit  of  referring  all  facts  in  history  and  all  items 
in  nature  to  the  latitude  and  longitude  of  Concord.  Thoreau, 
asked  whether  he  had  traveled,  replied,  Yes,  that  he  had  traveled 
widely  in  Concord.  Invited  to  go  to  the  Yosemite  Valley  with 
friends,  he  declined  on  the  ground  that  what  might  be  seen  in 
California  could  be  seen  as  well  in  Concord,  that  many  a  weed 
in  Massachusetts  meant  more  to  him  than  the  big  trees  of  the 
Pacific  Coast.  Urged  to  take  an  Atlantic  voyage,  he  refused,  since 

5i 


THE  DISCIPLINES  OF  LIBERTY 


the  ocean  was  to  him  only  a  big  Walden  Pond.  Reading  Kane’s 
“Arctic  Explorations,”  he  put  the  volume  by  with  the  observation 
that  most  of  the  phenomena  which  Kane  had  noted  in  the  Arctic 
Circle  he  himself  had  seen  in  Concord.  In  refusing  a  suggested 
trip  to  Paris,  he  said  that  there  was  no  use  in  going  to  France, 
since  Paris  would  be  only  a  stepping  stone  to  Concord,  a  school 
in  which  to  learn  to  live  better  at  home. 

My  feet  forever  stand 
On  Concord  fields, 

And  I  must  live  the  life 
Which  her  soil  yields. 

All  this  is  very  far  apart  from  the  dominant  temper  of  the  his¬ 
torical  method  in  religion  as  we  know  it  to-day.  But  if  our  com¬ 
pendium  of  fact  is  ever  to  be  resurrected  into  any  immediate  worth 
and  vitality  it  will  be  through  the  candid  application  of  this  fear¬ 
less  and  utterly  contemporaneous  temper. 

The  only  man  who  reads  his  Bible  aright  is  the  man  who  dares 
to  read  it  as  autobiography.  From  cover  to  cover  it  is  to  him 
either  a  symbol  of  his  own  experience,  or  it  is  nothing  at  all  other 
than  a  remote  chronicle  of  negligible  fact.  Until  a  man  under¬ 
stands  that  he  must  live  the  whole  Bible  in  his  own  person,  it  is 
a  closed  book  to  him.  But  so  read,  it  becomes  to  him  the  classic 
statement  of  his  own  spiritual  development.  He  begins  in  Eden 
with  his  own  age  of  innocence  and  passes  on  to  his  personal  dis¬ 
cerning  between  good  and  evil.  With  that  discovery  there  is  for 
him  forever  a  flaming  sword  before  the  lost  innocence  of  infancy. 
The  Call  of  Abraham  is  the  story  of  his  own  soul’s  awakening  in 
youth.  The  time  of  the  Judges  is  the  lawlessness  of  those  early 
years  when  he  does  what  is  right  in  his  own  eyes.  The  Kingdom 
is  his  age  of  imitation,  of  protective  spiritual  coloration.  With  the 
prophets  he  achieves  his  moral  liberty  and  with  the  Psalmists  and 
Wisdom  writers  passes  into  the  reflective  life.  In  Job  and  Eccle¬ 
siastes  he  first  feels  and  grapples  with  the  somber  mystery  of 
things.  With  the  Gospels  comes  his  second  birth  into  religious 
reality.  The  Acts  and  the  Epistles  mark  his  effort  to  apply  the 
convictions  of  his  religious  rebirth  to  the  common  task.  And  with 
the  Revelation  he  enters  into  the  last  wisdom  of  all  religious 
spirits — the  vision  of  that  ultimate  Reality  beyond  the  flaming 

52 


HISTORY  AND  DOGMA 

walls  of  the  world  where  all  his  imperfect  aspirations  are  to  be 
made  good  in  God. 

Fearlessly  to  subject  the  central  figure  of  Christian  history,  the 
figure  of  Jesus,  to  this  autobiographical  rereading,  may  savor  both 
of  arbitrary  egoism  and  moral  arrogance.  But  whatever  the  moral 
perils  of  this  process,  they  are  inevitable  in  the  life  of  free  and 
active  faith,  and  they  are  less  than  the  peril  which  lies  in  “archae¬ 
ological  Christianity.”  If  Jesus  is  not  our  contemporary  in  some 
profoundly  historical  sense  of  the  word,  then  he  is  nothing  to  us, 
and  he  can  save  neither  himself  nor  us. 

It  is  precisely  because  the  intuitions  of  simple  Christian  piety 
as  to  the  presence  of  the  living  Christ  in  the  soul  rest  upon  the 
solid  foundations  of  a  true  theory  of  history  and  of  the  great 
classics,  that  piety  has  so  often  been  religiously  right  where  ped¬ 
antry  has  been  religiously  wrong.  Why  is  it  that  Shakespeare 
lives  and  must  live?  Not  because  a  conspiracy  of  the  professors 
has  been  formed  to  foist  his  plays  off  as  a  dull  discipline  upon 
successive  generations.  Matthew  Arnold  knew  why  Shakespeare 
lives,  his  dramas  are  the  perennial  autobiography  of  the  race: 

All  pains  the  immortal  spirit  must  endure, 

All  weakness  which  impairs,  all  griefs  which  bow, 

Find  their  sole  speech  in  that  victorious  brow. 

As  Matthew  Arnold  found  himself  in  Shakespeare,  so  the  humble 
disciple  sings  of  Jesus  in  the  same  strain: 

Crown  him  the  Son  of  Man, 

Who  every  grief  hath  known 
That  wrings  the  human  breast, 

And  takes  and  bears  them  for  his  own, 

That  all  in  him  may  rest. 

The  strongest  motive  which  man  can  bring  to  bear  upon  man  in 
the  things  of  the  spirit  is  the  exercise  of  sympathy.  We  draw 
much  of  our  power  for  living  from  the  sense  of  things  shared 
fully  and  directly  with  our  human  kind.  Here  is  the  secret  of  the 
power  of  Jesus  over  the  marching  generations: 

O  Saviour  Christ,  Thou  too  art  man, 

Thou  hast  been  troubled,  tempted,  tried, 

Thy  kind  but  searching  glance  can  scan 
The  very  wounds  that  shame  would  hide. 

53 


THE  DISCIPLINES  OF  LIBERTY 


To  enter  into  the  long,  rich  heritage  of  Christian  history,  to 
appropriate  the  power  that  lies  undiminished  in  the  central  figure 
of  that  history,  what  is  this  but  to  dare  to  read  the  whole  record 
as  our  own  spiritual  autobiography?  Only  the  courage  of  this  high 
freedom  in  the  use  of  history  can  deliver  us  from  the  idolatry  of 
fact  and  make  us  disciples  in  spirit  and  in  truth. 

What  is  true  of  religious  fact  is  equally  true  of  religious  doc¬ 
trine.  Our  age  has  a  cheap  contempt  for  the  great  systems  of 
Christian  theology  which  is  a  sign,  not  of  intellectual  discrimina¬ 
tion,  but  of  fundamental  skepticism  as  to  the  value  of  all  thought. 
We  shall  do  more  justice  to  the  past  and  more  service  to  the 
future  if  we  approach  the  major  doctrines  of  the  Christian  reli¬ 
gion  with  a  deeper  humility  and  a  keener  insight. 

There  are  two  axioms  regarding  all  human  thought  which  are 
reasonably  reliable  and  upon  which  the  whole  body  of  Christian 
doctrine  rests.  The  first  is  this:  The  human  mind  does  not  occupy 
itself  for  any  length  of  time  with  unreality.  No  matter  how  gro¬ 
tesque  and  incredible  any  single  dogma  may  be,  if  century  after 
century  the  human  mind  revolves  around  that  idea,  it  is  a  fair 
deduction  that  at  the  heart  of  the  matter  there  must  be  some 
permanent  core  of  human  concern.  And  the  second  axiom  is  like 
unto  the  first:  Every  theological  doctrine,  however  uncongenial 
to  our  modern  mental  furniture  and  method,  has  its  origin  in  a 
human  experience.  Our  relation  to  the  dogma  is  only  a  mediate 
relationship,  our  ultimate  and  permanent  interest  is  in  the  original 
exciting  experience. 

St.  Paul  tells  us  that  he  had  a  stake  in  the  flesh.  That  means 
nothing  to  us  to-day.  But  we  may  not,  therefore,  leap  to  the  con¬ 
clusion  that  because  modern  medicine  and  surgery  do  not  recog¬ 
nize  “stakes  in  the  flesh”  there  was  nothing  the  matter  with  St. 
Paul.  It  is  his  disease  that  concerns  us,  not  his  diagnosis.  What 
we  have  to  do  is  to  find  out  whether  he  had  ophthalmia  or  acute 
indigestion  or  epileptic  headaches.  Something  was  the  matter  with 
St.  Paul’s  moral  nature  as  well.  He  said  that  he  had  been  infected 
by  Adam.  Modern  ethics  does  not  recognize  Adam  as  a  carrier  of 
moral  diseases.  But  this  does  not  mean  that  St.  Paul  was  a  reli¬ 
gious  valetudinarian  imagining  a  sick  conscience  and  a  spiritual 
impotence  which  did  not  exist.  What  we  wish  to  know  to-day  is 
this,  What  was  the  matter  with  the  man?  Where  did  he  contract 

54 


HISTORY  AND  DOGMA 


his  ill?  If  not  from  Adam,  then  possibly  from  the  saber-toothed 
tiger.  Do  men  have  the  same  moral  ills  to-day?  And,  if  so,  how 
do  they  describe  them  and  what  can  be  done  to  cure  them?  St. 
Paul  was  cured  of  his  spiritual  disease  on  the  road  to  Damascus. 
The  record  is  filled  as  a  matter  of  literal  account  with  certain 
difficulties  which  inhere  in  the  theory  of  the  supernatural.  But 
those  who  question  the  supernatural  intervention  must  still  inter¬ 
pret  the  fact.  It  will  not  do  to  discount  the  whole  narrative  as  the 
exaggerated  record  of  a  slight  sunstroke.  The  human  conscience 
is  not  set  at  ease  by  sunstrokes,  churches  are  not  founded  and 
continents  evangelized  by  sunstrokes.  If  we  abandon  the  whole 
Pauline  interpretation  of  experience,  we  may  not,  therefore,  deny 
the  experience,  but  must  seek  its  meanings  and  explanations  in  the 
terms  of  our  own  thought  and  understanding  of  life. 

Two  of  the  major  doctrines  of  the  Christian  religion,  for 
example,  never  perfectly  reconciled,  are  the  doctrines  of  Election 
and  Free  Will.  They  are 

The  yea-nay  of  free  will  and  fate, 

Whereof  both  cannot  be,  yet  are. 

Judged  merely  as  dogmas  each  is  arbitrary  and  both  are  mu¬ 
tually  irreconcilable.  But  read  as  the  interpretation  of  experience 
each  is  credible  and  both  together  adequate  accounts  of  life. 
These  two  doctrines  never  faced  one  another  more  frankly  and 
fully  than  in  the  Pelagian  controversy.  As  a  matter  of  the  history 
of  dogma  that  controversy  belongs  to  old,  forgotten  things.  But 
as  a  matter  of  permanent  human  experience  this  fifth  century  argu¬ 
ment  is  simply  an  item  in  the  life  of  the  twentieth  century.  To 
Augustine,  hounded  by  his  own  conscience  from  teacher  to  teacher, 
driven  at  last  to  Milan,  to  Ambrose,  and  finally  to  a  child’s  voice 
heard  over  a  garden  wall,  “Tolle,  lege ;  tolle,  lege  ,”  the  doctrine 
of  the  Irresistible  Grace  of  God,  of  the  Divine  Election,  seemed 
the  only  true  account  of  his  passage  through  the  time  of  storm 
and  stress  into  the  peace  of  God.  But  to  Pelagius,  whose  character 
was  the  product  of  patient  and  unremitted  moral  watchfulness, 
who  had  slowly  built  up  the  fabric  of  a  Christian  life  by  his  own 
effort,  the  doctrine  of  free  will  seemed  the  only  true  account  of  the 
way  men  come  to  God.  Each  or  both  of  these  doctrines  may  be 
inadequate  and  incredible,  but  the  experience  of  Augustine  and 

55 


THE  DISCIPLINES  OF  LIBERTY 

Pelagius  alike  are  both  part  of  the  common  spiritual  history  of 
good  men. 

The  day  is  passed  when  “orthodoxy”  is  a  hall-mark  of  religious 
excellence.  Orthodoxy,  as  Phillips  Brooks  used  to  remind  candi¬ 
dates  for  ordination,  has  served  a  moderately  useful  function  at 
certain  times  of  spiritual  slack  water  in  Christian  history. 

“It  has  no  doubt  served  to  carry  the  Church  over,  as  it  were, 
some  of  those  periods  of  depressed  and  weakened  vitality  which 
come  between  the  exalted  and  spontaneous  conditions  which  are 
its  true  life.  The  same  service,  perhaps,  it  renders  also  to  the  per¬ 
sonal  experience,  bridging  the  sad  chasms  between  the  rock  of  belief 
on  this  side  and  the  rock  of  belief  on  that  side  with  the  wooden 
structure  of  conformity.  But  the  indictment  which  can  be  sus¬ 
tained  against  it  is  tremendous.  .  .  .  Orthodoxy  deals  in  coarse 
averages.  It  makes  of  the  world  of  truth  a  sort  of  dollar-store, 
wherein  a  few  things  are  rated  below  their  real  value  for  the  sake 
of  making  a  host  of  other  things  pass  for  more  than  they  are 
worth.  ...  It  makes  possible  an  easy  transmission  of  truth  but 
only  by  the  deadening  of  truth,  as  a  butcher  freezes  meat  in  order 
to  carry  it  across  the  sea.” 

The  case  against  wooden  orthodoxy  of  doctrine  has  been  so 
fully  established  that  it  needs  no  further  prosecution.  The  time 
is  coming,  however,  when  we  may  well  afford  to  realize  that 
although  there  cannot  be  any  permanent  orthodoxy  in  doctrine, 
since  the  intellectual  forms  and  fashions  in  which  life  expresses 
itself  are  always  in  process  of  change,  there  is,  however,  a  per¬ 
manent  orthodoxy  of  religious  experience. 

It  is  this  orthodoxy  of  experience,  and  not  of  dogma,  which  a 
true  interest  in  Christian  doctrine  always  seeks.  The  paradox  of 
all  heretics  and  all  heresies  lies  in  the  fact  that  they  dissent  from 
the  letter  of  the  dogma  only  to  rediscover  the  orthodox  experience. 
Chesterton’s  insistence  that  the  heretic  is  really  the  most  orthodox 
man  of  his  time  could  be  made  good  again  and  again  in  Christian 
history.  The  Christian  Church  can  afford  to  be  very  tolerant  of 
her  heretics,  because  they  are  the  true  mediators  in  history  of  the 
only  orthodoxy  which  is  worth  preserving  and  reverencing,  that  of 
life  itself.  The  Vincentian  canon,  “Quod  semper ,  quod  ubique , 
quod  ab  omnibus  ”  is  meaningless  as  a  theological  dictum.  But  it 

56 


HISTORY  AND  DOGMA 

is  profoundly  true  as  a  definition  of  the  major  facts  of  religious 
experience. 

A  great  Protestant  theologian  of  our  own  time  has  confessed 
that  “When  a  man  grows  older  and  sees  more  deeply  into  life,  he 
does  not  find  if  he  possesses  any  inner  world  at  all  that  he  is 
advanced  by  the  external  march  of  things,  by  The  progress  of 
civilization.’  Nay,  rather  he  feels  himself,  where  he  was  before, 
and  forced  to  seek  the  sources  of  strength  which  his  forefathers 
sought.”  That  is  a  confession  of  orthodoxy  in  experience  made  by 
one  who  is  a  radical  in  theology.  Yet  he  rests  the  case  for  doctrine 
where  alone  it  can  be  permanently  rested,  on  the  community  of 
experience,  rather  than  on  the  diversity  of  explanation. 

There  never  has  been,  there  is  not  now,  for  example,  any  en¬ 
tirely  adequate  doctrine  of  the  atonement.  The  elder  doctrines  of 
the  atonement  offend  the  moral  sense  of  to-day.  The  latter  doc¬ 
trines  seem  wanting  in  an  appreciation  of  the  mystery  of  Calvary. 
Yet,  as  Royce  reminds  us,  the  doctrine  of  the  atonement  rests  upon 
a  moral  experience  so  deep  and  so  universal  that,  even  had  Jesus 
never  lived  and  died,  the  mind  of  man  would  have  had  to  fashion 
some  doctrine  of  atonement  to  account  for  life.  For  beneath  and 
beyond  all  inadequate  dogmas  of  the  cross  lies  the  simple  fact  of 
life,  that  good  men  again  and  again  suffer  because  of  bad  men, 
and  that  in  the  spectacle  of  this  suffering  there  lies  an  almost 
unequaled  moral  energy. 

In  earth  or  heaven, 

Bold  sailor  on  the  sea, 

What  have  I  given 

That  you  should  die  for  me? 

What  can  I  give, 

O  soldier  leal  and  brave, 

Long  as  I  live 
To  pay  the  life  you  gave? 

What  tithe  or  part 
Can  I  return  to  thee, 

O  stricken  heart, 

That  thou  shouldest  break  for  me? 

The  wind  of  death 
For  you  hath  slain  life’s  flowers. 

It  withereth  (God  grant) 

All  weeds  in  ours. 

57 


THE  DISCIPLINES  OF  LIBERTY 


That  is  the  great  community  of  experience  which  lies  behind 
all  doctrines  of  atonement.  No  doctrine  can  ever  give  an  adequate 
account  of  the  central  moral  mystery.  There  can  be  no  permanent 
orthodoxy  of  explanation.  Every  dogma  is  at  best  a  broken  light 
which  serves  its  own  time  inadequately,  then  gutters  and  goes  out. 
But  of  the  living  comradeship  of  the  centuries  in  the  presence  of 
the  Calvary-like  experience  there  is  no  doubt.  The  ancient  doc¬ 
trines  may  all  be  alien  to  our  thought,  but  the  old  experience  must 
always  be  a  part  of  our  spiritual  autobiography. 

Every  doctrine,  then,  is  but  a  schoolmaster  to  lead  us  to  the 
relatively  permanent  content  of  common  religious  experience,  its 
few  central  emotions  and  convictions,  actions  and  reactions.  In 
theology  a  man  in  our  own  time  may  be  a  heretic  without  peril  to 
his  soul,  but  if  he  be  a  profoundly  religious  man  he  will  become 
more  and  more  conscious  of  the  orthodoxy  of  life  itself  and  of  his 
own  experience  where  it  is  hid  in  the  common  heart  of  man  and 
hid  in  the  unchanging  Reality  that  is  the  heart  of  God. 


58 


I 


CHAPTER  IV. 


A  Modern  Doctrine  of  Original  Sin. 


“  4  S  I  walked  through  the  wilderness  of  this  world,  I  lighted 

/  %  on  a  certain  place,  where  was  a  Den,  and  I  laid  me  down 
X  JL in  that  place  to  sleep.  And  as  I  slept,  I  dreamed  a  Dream. 
I  dreamed  and  behold  I  saw  a  Man  cloathed  with  rags,  standing 
in  a  certain  place,  with  his  face  from  his  own  house,  a  Book  in 
his  hand,  and  a  great  Burden  upon  his  back.  I  looked  and  saw 
him  open  the  Book  and  read  therein;  and  as  he  read,  he  wept  and 
trembled;  and  not  being  able  longer  to  continue,  he  brake  out 
with  a  lamentable  cry,  saying,  What  shall  I  do.  .  .  .  I  am  undone 
by  reason  of  a  Burden  that  lieth  hard  upon  me.  ...  I  care  not 
what  I  meet  if  so  be  I  can  also  meet  deliverance  from  this 
Burden .” 

There  is  no  point  at  which  modern  liberal  Protestantism  stands 
in  sharper  contrast  to  historic  Christianity  as  a  whole  than  in  its 
indifference  to  this  initial  mood  of  Christian  experience.  It  does 
not  matter  where  we  turn,  in  what  past  century  or  to  what  type  of 
record,  the  Christian  life  uniformly  began,  in  the  generations  gone, 
as  an  effort  to  roll  away  the  heavy  burden  of  sin  and  guilt  from 
the  bowed  shoulders  of  the  human  conscience. 

The  preaching  ministry  of  Jesus  opened  with  an  unqualified 
command  to  repent.  Jesus  did  not  seek  to  create  the  sense  of  sin 
or  even  to  explain  it,  he  presupposed  it.  Christianity  came  to  Paul 
as  a  great  deliverance  from  the  moral  horror  of  a  body  of  spiritual 
death  to  which  he  had  been  chained.  It  released  him  from  his 
ghastly  comradeship  with  ethical  corruption.  The  classical  world 
into  which  Christianity  entered  and  in  which  its  early  conquests 
were  made,  was  bowed  down  by  the  sense  of  sin.  Neoplatonism 
and  the  mystery  religions,  the  only  significant  extra-Christian 
movements  of  the  first  three  centuries  of  our  era,  both  appealed  to 
the  troubled  conscience  of  paganism.  Christianity  competed  with 

59 


THE  DISCIPLINES  OF  LIBERTY 


them  and  prevailed  because  it  proffered  a  sounder  healing  for  the 
hurt  at  the  heart  of  the  ancient  world. 

The  mystics,  of  whom  Saint  Martin  says,  “They  all  come  from 
the  same  country  and  speak  the  same  language,”  are  at  one  in 
their  account  of  the  rungs  in  the  ladder  of  perfection.  The  first  of 
these  steps,  following  hard  after  the  moment  of  the  soul’s  con¬ 
scious  awakening,  is  that  of  purgation,  self-discipline,  the  effort 
of  the  ardent  conscience  to  roll  from  off  its  shoulders  its  heavy 
and  weary  weight  of  guilt. 

For  eighteen  hundred  years  the  dominant  theology  of  all  creeds 
and  churches  had,  as  its  point  of  departure,  its  sting  “that  bids 
nor  sit  nor  stand  but  go,”  this  universal  consciousness  of  inherent 
and  original  sin.  However  Paul,  Augustine,  Calvin  and  Edwards 
may  have  differed  in  theological  detail  they  are  all  agreed  in 
appealing  primarily  to  the  malaise  of  the  human  conscience.  The 
comparative  study  of  all  religions,  indeed,  bears  out  William 
James’s  familiar  statement  that  “The  completest  religions  Sfeem 
to  be  those  in  which  the  pessimistic  elements  are  best  developed. 
Buddhism,  of  course,  and  Christianity  are  the  best  known  to  us 
of  these.  They  are  essentially  religions  of  deliverance.”  Tyrrell 
puts  it  in  another  way  when  he  says  that  the  Christian  view  of  the 
world  is  an  ultimate  optimism,  but  that  this  optimism  rests  on  a 
provisional  pessimism.  A  religion  which  makes  its  initial  appeal 
to  the  consciousness  of  original  goodness,  to  moral  self-compla¬ 
cency,  would  not  have  been  recognized  before  1850  as  the  Chris¬ 
tian  religion. 

“The  modern  man,”  says  Sir  Oliver  Lodge,  “is  not  bothering 
about  his  sins.  If  he  is  good  for  anything  he  is  up  and  doing.”  The 
conceiver  of  that  premature  birth  which  was  known  as  the  “New 
Theology”  began  his  Pilgrim’s  Progress  with  a  very  different 
statement  from  that  of  John  Bunyan’s.  He  tells  us  that,  al¬ 
though  the  average  Christian  still  kneels  in  church  and  con¬ 
fesses  Sunday  by  Sunday  that  he  is  a  miserable  sinner,  he  really 
does  not  mean  it.  If  someone  were  to  stop  him  on  the  street  Mon¬ 
day  morning  and  charge  him  with  actually  being  a  miserable 
sinner,  he  certainly  would  be  very  angry,  would  demand  that  the 
libelous  critic  specify  in  detail  and  then  would  probably  institute 
legal  proceedings  for  defamation  of  character! 

So  utterly  has  this  whole  dogma  dropped  below  the  religious 

60 


ORIGINAL  SIN 


horizon  of  the  normal  man  of  to-day  that  he  simply  has  no  idea  of 
what  historic  Christianity  meant  by  its  doctrine  of  total  depravity. 
It  is  told  of  a  certain  dour  Scotch  chaplain  who  was  still  under 
the  spell  of  the  somber  tenets  of  Calvinism,  that  one  day,  preach¬ 
ing  to  his  boys  in  France,  he  fell  under  heavy  conviction  of  sin 
and  said  that  he  knew  he  was  the  wickedest  and  most  sinful  man 
in  France  at  that  moment.  The  healthy  young  barbarians  heard 
this  statement  with  a  bewildered  deference,  and  finally  the  awk¬ 
ward  silence  at  the  close  of  the  service  was  broken  by  a  breezy 
young  officer  who  stepped  up  and  said,  “Well,  Sir,  you  must  get 
a  tremendous  lot  of  satisfaction  out  of  remembering  what  a  per¬ 
fectly  ripping  time  you’ve  had.”  So  little  does  the  youth  of  our 
day  begin  to  appreciate  the  tears  for  sin  with  which  the  fathers 
prevented  the  night  watches. 

“This,  then,”  says  Johnston  Ross,  taking  up  the  tale,  “is  the 
quintessence  of  the  Christianity  of  the  hour — helpfulness.  In  the 
dim  backgrounds  of  a  history  semi-legendary,  semi-mythological 
lies  the  Titanic  struggle  of  the  Son  of  God  with  Sin  and  Death  in 
the  agonies  of  Calvary,  flung  back  there  as  we  fling  the  legends 
of  Arthur  and  Beowulf  and  Siegfried.  The  older  generation  began 
at  a  point  of  grave  concern  as  to  personal  status  before  a  holy 
God.  It  wrestled  with  the  awful  facts  of  guilt  and  of  the  ineradi¬ 
cable  consequences  of  sin.  I  remember  that  I  once  had  the  honor 
of  preaching  for  a  minister  of  the  older  generation.  I  found  him 
preparing  an  address  for  the  General  Assembly.  He  said  to  me,  T 
am  writing  about  the  evangelical  outlook.  We  older  men  knew 
what  Christ  did  for  us  on  Calvary;  but  precisely  what  does  this 
beautiful  young  Apollo  whom  your  younger  men  adore  do  for 
you?’  ” 

Nothing  is  clearer,  to-day,  than  the  indifference  of  the  crowd  to 
the  traditional  message  of  the  Christian  religion,  or  at  least  to  the 
conventional  terms  in  which  that  message  has  for  centuries  been 
cast.  The  Church  must  accept  her  full  and  fair  burden  of  the 
responsibility  for  this  growing  misunderstanding,  this  lack  of  a 
common  ground  of  speech  in  the  vernacular  of  the  pulpit  and  the 
vernacular  of  the  street.  But  the  problem  is  something  more  than 
a  mere  lack  of  mutual  understanding  of  vernaculars.  The  ground 
of  the  apparent  impotence  of  the  Christian  religion  in  modern 
society  is  found,  in  part  at  least,  in  the  fact  that  from  the  first 

61 


THE  DISCIPLINES  OF  LIBERTY 


our  religion  has  addressed  itself  primarily  to  the  sense  of  human 
sin  and  the  burden  of  moral  guilt.  Most  of  the  deeper  stuff  of  our 
spiritual  heritage  is  concerned  with  the  healing  of  the  ills  of  the 
human  conscience.  But  young  Apollos  have  no  hurt  of  conscience, 
and  in  a  time  which  thinks  well  of  itself  morally,  the  offices  of 
Christianity  seem  superfluous  and  its  central  doctrine  of  salvation, 
gratuitous. 

There  is  in  one  of  our  American  seaboard  cities  a  long  estab¬ 
lished  philanthropy  founded  years  ago  to  provide  a  decent  shore 
home  for  deep-sea  sailors.  In  the  days  of  the  clipper  ships  the 
life  of  a  man  before  the  mast  yielded  much  hardship  and  few 
compensations.  A  half  century  ago  this  sailors’  home  hard  by  the 
wharves  kept  open  house  for  the  seaman  in  port.  The  pittance 
which  he  brought  ashore  as  wages  gave  him  there  a  decent  home, 
good  food  and  a  friendly  environment.  The  clipper  ships  are 
gone.  The  deck  hands  on  the  steamers  which  now  dock  where  the 
clippers  used  to  lie  are  paid  a  hundred  dollars  a  month  at  sea, 
with  all  found,  and  a  shore  allowance  of  three  dollars  a  day  while 
in  port.  They  no  longer  need  the  charitable  ministries  of  the 
sailors’  home.  They  pass  by  its  doors  with  a  substantial  roll  of 
bills  in  their  pockets,  they  go  up  town  to  the  regular  hostelries, 
and  live  as  becomes  men  no  longer  dependent  upon  charity. 
Meanwhile,  bound  hand  and  foot  by  laws  governing  the  use  of 
trust  funds,  this  sailors’  home  cannot  alienate  any  of  its  income 
for  the  other  human  needs  which  have  grown  up  in  the  city,  and 
after  all  expenses  have  been  paid,  there  is  a  margin  of  income  from 
the  endowments  which  rolls  up  year  after  year.  Eventually  some 
radical  readjustment  to  the  contemporary  fact  will  be  necessary. 
The  society  will  have  to  seek  relief  from  the  legislature  that  it 
may  be  free  to  divert  these  funds  into  lines  of  fresh  service  not 
anticipated  by  the  founders.  Otherwise  its  present  sponsors  will 
have  hard  work  getting  their  ample  camel  of  a  charity  into  the 
heaven  of  ultimate  self-respect  through  the  eye  of  the  moral 
needle.  For  one  cannot  minister  to  needs  which  have  ceased  to 
exist. 

Now  contemporary  Christianity  is  in  something  of  the  same 
dilemma.  Its  sacred  trust  was  at  the  first  established  and  was  sub¬ 
sequently  endowed  in  history  by  the  labors  of  many  devoted 
souls,  to  heal  the  hurt  of  the  moral  nature.  But  in  a  time  when 

62 


ORIGINAL  SIN 


there  is  little  or  no  felt  hurt  in  the  conscience  of  Christendom  it 
is  a  perfectly  fair  question  what  the  office  of  the  Christian  religion 
really  is.  Hoffding  laments  that  whereas  formerly  religion  was  the 
pillar  of  cloud  by  day  and  of  fire  by  night  which  marched  in  the 
vanguard  of  history,  now  it  is  only  an  ambulance  corps  trailing 
along  in  the  rear  of  the  conflict  caring  for  the  sick  and  wounded. 
But  even  this  caring  for  the  wounded  has  ceased  to  be  a  moral 
ministry.  It  is  divided,  at  the  best,  between  proffering  some  solace 
to  the  bereaved,  a  solace  which  the  Psychical  Research  Society 
threatens  to  monopolize,  and  doing  “friendly  visiting”  for  the 
Associated  Charities,  too  often  a  mistaken  mixture  of  patronage 
and  curiosity.  As  for  healing  the  moral  hurt  of  those  whose  con¬ 
science  has  been  sorely  wounded  in  the  conflict  of  life,  that  par¬ 
ticular  type  of  wound  is  the  exception. 

We  talk  of  “sin,”  that  ancient  obsession  of  the  fathers,  and 
“men  smile  and  pass  by.”  There  is,  patently,  some  fundamental 
maladaptation  to  environment  in  the  whole  situation.  Whether  the 
spiritual  fault  be  that  of  the  religion  or  the  environment  is  one 
of  the  moot  moral  problems  of  the  day.  It  simply  does  no  good  to 
work  oneself  into  a  kind  of  dervish  fervor  of  evangelical  piety  by 
preaching  about  the  exceeding  sinfulness  of  sin,  or  to  print  the 
word  with  a  capital  “S.”  These  are  the  poor  resorts  of  a  religion 
which  is  confessedly  at  its  wits’  ends  to  find  something  to  do  in 
the  world.  They  are  a  confession  that  evangelical  piety  despairs 
of  making  itself  understood  in  any  rational  way  and  has  to  resort 
to  the  effects  of  theological  incantation.  All  this  is  merely  seeking 
refuge  in  those  vain  repetitions  against  which  the  Master  warned 
us.  The  conventional  revival  meeting  method  of  preaching  sin  is 
about  as  effective  with  the  modern  mind  as  the  idle  revolutions 
of  a  Thibetan  prayer  wheel.  The  trombone  if  played  long  enough 
and  loud  enough  may  produce,  by  a  kind  of  autosuggestion  or 
through  a  semi-hypnotic  condition,  a  temporary  sense  of  sin.  But 
the  emotion  does  not  last  beyond  the  doors  of  the  overheated 
tabernacle,  and  it  represents  no  permanent  ethical  reality  in  the 
normal  mind  of  the  man  of  to-day.  Proffering  thus,  the  traditional 
gospel  of  a  glorious  salvation  from  sin  is  a  kind  of  casting  the 
pearls  of  our  hereditary  faith  before  men  who  so  far  from  con¬ 
ceiving  of  themselves  as  immoral  swine,  habitually  think  of  them- 

63 


THE  DISCIPLINES  OF  LIBERTY 


selves  as  moral  rajahs  whose  casket  of  virtues  is  so  full  that  it 
has  no  need  of  any  pearl  of  great  price  more. 

In  short,  the  whole  furniture  of  the  Pauline  doctrine  of  human 
sinfulness  no  longer  makes  any  appeal  to  the  modern  mind.  It 
is  simply  dead  and  gone,  in  its  traditional  form;  of  interest  to  the 
antiquarian,  but  without  any  point  of  vital  contact  with  the 
moral  consciousness  of  the  present  hour.  To  say  “In  Adam’s  fall 
we  sinned  all”  is  to  say  nothing  to  this  generation.  The  modern 
man  feels  that  Adam  has  been  a  badly  overworked  character  in 
human  history  and  that  he  deserves  now  some  eternal  Sabbath 
of  respite  from  the  obloquy  which  our  thankless  predecessors  cast 
on  him.  We  think  better  of  him  than  they  thought,  and  as  for  the 
fruit  of  the  tree  of  the  knowledge  of  good  and  evil — the  sin  in 
Eden  that  they  did  by  two  and  two  they  must  long  since  have 
paid  for  one  by  one.  It  was,  of  course,  the  advent  of  the  modern 
sciences  which  issued  Adam  his  indeterminate  ticket  of  moral 
leave  in  history  and  wrecked  the  whole  grim  system  which  had 
been  built  up  around  him.  He  remained  a  person  to  conjure  with 
ethically  until  he  was  confronted  by  Darwin,  Lyell,  Spencer  and 
Co.  Since  then  he  has  been  superseded  by  a  half-erect  biped  with 
a  sharply  recessive  forehead,  somewhere  along  the  line  between 
Pithecanthropus  erectus  and  the  Neanderthal  savage  whose  back¬ 
ground  is  the  nebular  hypothesis  and  the  primeval  ooze;  nebula, 
ooze  and  biped  all  alike  simply  nonmoral. 

One  cannot  review,  however,  the  unbroken  history  of  Christian 
thought  over  eighteen  centuries,  and  then  the  clean  break  of  the 
nineteenth  century  with  the  fundamental  conviction  of  the  past  as 
to  man’s  sinful  nature,  without  some  sober  second  thoughts.  Cer¬ 
tainly  Charles  Darwin  has  not  proved  an  altogether  adequate 
successor  to  the  great  preachers  of  yesterday,  and  “The  Ascent 
of  Man”  has  not  hastened  the  moral  millennium  appreciably. 
Everywhere  there  is  to-day  a  willingness  to  review  the  total  wit¬ 
ness  of  Christian  experience  and  to  recover  from  the  faith  of  the 
past  such  of  its  central  convictions  as  may  have  been  too  easily 
and  cavalierly  abandoned. 

If  we  abide  by  the  proposition  of  the  previous  chapter  that  the 
human  mind  does  not  permanently  occupy  itself  with  unreality 
and  that  behind  every  doctrine,  however  incredible  and  arbitrary, 
there  lies  some  actual  human  experience,  we  have  ground  for  the 

64 


ORIGINAL  SIN 

shrewd  suspicion  that  in  the  old  dogma  of  original  sin  there  must 
lie  some  more  or  less  permanent  element  of  the  moral  life,  which 
still  persists  though  it  is  not  recognized  when  clothed  in  the  dis¬ 
carded  systems  of  yesterday. 

There  is,  as  a  matter  of  fact,  no  single  article  in  the  creeds  of 
the  elder  orthodoxy  which  so  sorely  needs  candid  reexamination 
in  our  own  day  as  does  this  of  original  sin,  not  only  that  we  may 
restore  the  continuity  of  the  Christian  consciousness  unbroken, 
but  that  once  more  we  may  commend  our  religion  of  salvation 
to  the  deeper  want  of  the  world.  What  the  thoughtful  man  seeks 
to-day  is  not  to  rehabilitate  the  letter  of  the  system  of  the  fathers, 
but  to  enter  with  a  more  resourceful  sympathy  into  the  experience 
of  the  fathers,  to  discover  what  the  marching  generations  still 
share  in  the  common  moral  consciousness  of  the  race. 

When  we  turn  back  to  the  tradition  of  the  elders  regarding 
original  sin,  what  strikes  us  at  once  is  the  fact  that  sin  was  not 
with  them  a  synonym  for  vice.  It  is  just  this  modern  reduction  of 
the  idea  of  original  sin  to  occasional  vice  which  has  created  for 
us  our  initial  misunderstandings.  The  modern  church  member  is 
probably  not  a  man  of  gross  viciousness,  but  neither  was  Paul 
such  a  man,  nor  Augustine,  nor  Calvin.  Whatever  the  thing  may 
have  been,  it  was  not  the  sort  of  transgression  which  is  confessed 
by  the  sower  of  wild  oats  at  a  Salvation  Army  mourners’  bench. 

Santayana  says  that  Calvinism  was  essentially  an  expression  of 
the  agonized  conscience.  That  is  the  simplest  and  best  working 
definition  of  the  whole  system  which  could  be  fashioned.  But  the 
longer  one  ponders  this  agonized  conscience  the  clearer  it  is  that 
its  suffering  was  not  a  mere  superficial  irritation.  Just  before  he 
died,  Robert  Hugh  Benson  said  that  he  felt  ill,  “not  at  the  top, 
but  deep  down  from  the  inside.”  The  conscience  of  the  Calvinist 
ailed  in  the  same  way,  deep  down  inside.  His  constant  burden  was 
not  a  mere  cumulation  of  peccadilloes.  It  was  not  that  he  went  to 
sleep  in  the  Lord’s  house  on  Sunday  and  had  to  be  prodded  into 
reverential  wakefulness  by  the  tithing  man,  or  that  he  lost  his 
temper  on  Monday,  or  drank  one  too  many  mugs  of  mead  on 
Tuesday,  or  cut  too  sharp  a  corner  on  Wednesday’s  horse  trade. 

These  items  were  deplorable  enough  in  their  own  way.  But  they 
were  of  moral  significance  only  because  they  were  the  outcroppings 
of  a  constant  liability  which,  weeded  out  at  one  spot  in  character, 

65 


THE  DISCIPLINES  OF  LIBERTY 


reappeared  in  another.  They  were  like  those  masses  of  pusley 
which  Charles  Dudley  Warner  describes  so  feelingly  in  his 
“Summer  in  a  Garden.”  The  whole  subsoil  of  that  garden  was 
nothing  but  a  tangled  mesh  of  roots  of  witch  grass.  So,  for  the 
Calvinist,  the  whole  subsoil  of  character  was  matted  through  and 
through  by  the  weedy  mesh  of  moral  liability.  To  dig  it  up 
seemed  a  hopeless  task.  If  you  cleared  character  at  any  one  spot, 
sin  only  got  ahead  of  you  somewhere  else. 

This  thing  that  he  called  original  sin  seemed  to  be  constantly 
vitiating  his  whole  personal  struggle  after  virtue.  His  moral 
problem  was  not  to  keep  his  petty  cash  account  with  God  bal¬ 
anced  week  by  week.  What  haunted  his  soul  was  the  knowledge 
that  there  was  a  mortgage  on  the  whole  business,  and  that  if  the 
moral  order  suddenly  foreclosed,  as  it  might  at  any  moment, 
he  would  be  found  bankrupt,  his  few  private  profits  on  the  moral 
venture  counting  for  nothing  against  his  heavy  outstanding  human 
liabilities. 

So,  in  his  famous  Enfield  sermon,  Jonathan  Edwards  says  that 
every  little  child  born  into  the  world  is  more  hateful  to  God  than 
the  loathliest  viper  that  crawls  on  the  ground.  But,  as  Leslie 
Stephen  shrewdly  remarks,  Jonathan  Edwards  seems,  nevertheless, 
“to  have  had  a  very  happy  time  of  it  amid  a  brood  of  eleven  little 
vipers  of  his  own  begetting!”  That  comment  lights  up  the  other¬ 
wise  baffling  paradox  which  runs  through  all  Calvinism  that  the 
better  a  man  is  the  more  sinful  he  seems  to  himself  to  be.  We  must 
conclude  that  the  viperish  quality  of  the  Edwards  brood  was  not 
an  induction  from  the  facts  of  the  Edwards  home  reached  in  a 
bilious  moment  of  parental  petulance,  but  an  a  priori  judgment 
passed  on  all  childhood,  on  which  Edwards  based  his  survey  of 
human  nature  as  a  whole.  What  vexed  the  soul  of  Jonathan 
Edwards  was  not  that  the  Edwards  children  were  mischievous 
and  irritating  beyond  the  common  kind,  but  that  simply  by  being 
born  into  the  world  at  all  every  one  of  us  has  to  accept  certain 
inevitable  and  inalienable  moral  liabilities  as  part  of  his  birth¬ 
right. 

The  problem  which  faces  the  modem  preacher  who  still  has  a 
message  of  salvation  and  redemption  to  preach  to  the  world  is 
to  find  the  equivalent  forms  of  the  agonized  conscience  of  Calvin¬ 
ism  in  the  thought  of  our  own  time.  Once  we  define  the  doctrine 

66 


ORIGINAL  SIN 


of  original  sin  as  an  early  and  inadequate  effort  to  express  the 
sense  of  personal  participation  in  the  corporate  moral  liabilities 
of  humanity  as  a  whole,  we  begin  to  see  our  way  ahead.  We  may 
candidly  leave  the  items  of  private  vice  and  virtue  to  one  side 
altogether.  They  have  nothing  to  do  with  the  major  problem,  save 
as  they  are  interesting  casual  manifestations  of  the  moral  situa¬ 
tion  as  a  whole. 

The  true  successors  to  the  Calvinist  with  his  agonized  con¬ 
science  and  his  initial  dogma  of  original  sin  are  to  be  found  to-day 
among  the  biologists,  the  psychologists,  the  novelists  and  the 
dramatists.  It  is  very  seldom  that  one  hears  in  the  modern  pulpit 
any  note  approximating  to  that  of  the  elder  theology  voicing  its 
burden  of  human  guilt.  But  one  does  not  have  to  seek  far  in 
these  other  quarters  before  one  realizes  that  one  is  still  in  the 
presence  of  the  agonized  human  conscience  and  that  although  it 
now  speaks  a  new  dialect,  its  central  consciousness  is  qualitatively 
unchanged. 

Perhaps  the  most  important  and  epoch-making  utterance  in  the 
realm  of  biological  science  since  Darwin’s  “Origin  of  Species”  was 
Huxley’s  Romanes  Lecture  on  “Evolution  and  Ethics,”  given  at 
Oxford  in  1893.  That  is  a  full  generation  ago.  But  Huxley,  as  he 
well  enough  knew,  in  delivering  that  address,  was  before  his  time 
and  he  raised  then  what  has  since  become  the  really  important 
problem  in  connection  with  the  whole  biological  reading  of  man’s 
life  in  nature  and  society. 

In  that  address  Huxley  turned  state’s  evidence  against  the 
whole  overhopeful  ethical  deductions  drawn  by  Spencer  and  John 
Fiske  and  Henry  Drummond  from  the  theory  of  natural  selec¬ 
tion.  Huxley  came  in  that  maturest  moment  of  his  thinking  to 
the  conclusion  that  the  struggle  for  existence  was  immoral,  or  at 
the  best  nonmoral  in  its  methods.  His  argument  need  not  be  re¬ 
produced  in  detail.  Suffice  to  say  that  he  took  his  stand  as  an 
ethical  teacher  against  all  the  neopaganism  of  our  day  which 
would  seek  salvation  by  abandoning  ourselves  to  the  instincts 
which  drive  the  cosmic  process.  The  ape  and  the  tiger  served  their 
part  in  the  hot  youth  of  the  race.  They  have  ceased  to  be  an  asset 
and  have  now  become  a  liability.  “The  practice  of  what  is  ethi¬ 
cally  best — what  we  call  goodness  or  virtue — involves  a  course  of 
conduct  which,  in  all  respects,  is  opposed  to  that  which  leads  to 

67 


THE  DISCIPLINES  OF  LIBERTY 


success  in  the  cosmic  struggle.  It  repudiates  the  gladiatorial  theory 
of  existence.  Let  us  understand,  once  for  all,  that  the  ethical 
progress  of  society  depends,  not  on  imitating  the  cosmic  struggle, 
still  less  in  running  away  from  it,  but  in  combating  it.” 

The  significance  of  the  Romanes  Lecture  for  the  religious 
thinker  lies  in  the  fact  that  it  aligned  Huxley  with  Calvinism,  and 
that  he  knew  it  and  was  content  to  stand  there.  He  himself  cari¬ 
catured  his  own  lecture  as  “a  very  orthodox  sermon  on  ‘Satan  the 
Prince  of  this  World.’  ”  In  other  words,  he  felt  that  the  science 
of  biology  had  revealed  in  some  new  and  terrible  way  the  moral 
liability  of  every  child  of  man,  a  liability  reaching  back  of  the 
mythical  Garden  of  Eden  to  the  jungle  where  the  saber-toothed 
tiger  roamed  at  large,  and  where  red  ravin  went  its  lawless  way. 
And  he  felt  the  stirrings  of  the  tiger  in  his  own  blood  to  be  more 
real  and  ominous  than  any  spell  cast  by  Adam  over  the  race. 

“It  is,”  he  writes  to  a  friend,  “the  superiority  of  the  best 
theological  teachers  to  the  majority  of  their  opponents  that  they 
substantially  recognize  the  reality  of  things,  however  strange  the 
forms  in  which  they  clothe  their  conceptions.  The  doctrines  of 
predestination,  original  sin,  of  the  innate  depravity  of  man  and 
the  evil  fate  of  the  greater  part  of  the  race,  of  the  primacy  of 
Satan  in  this  world,  of  the  essential  vileness  of  matter,  appear  to 
me  vastly  nearer  the  truth  than  the  liberal  popular  illusion  that 
babies  are  all  born  good,  that  it  is  given  to  everybody  to  realize 
his  ethical  ideal  if  he  will  only  try,  that  all  partial  evil  is  uni¬ 
versal  good  and  other  optimistic  figments  which  bid  us  believe 
that  everything  will  come  right  at  the  last.”  Huxley’s  moral 
consciousness,  as  a  biologist,  was  agonized,  and  his  initial  outlook 
on  life  was  a  provisional  pessimism.  He  stands  in  the  straight  line 
of  ethical  succession  from  Edwards,  Calvin,  Augustine  and  Paul. 
He  proffers  no  facile  gospel  of  social  salvation — he  did  not  con¬ 
ceive  that  to  be  his  task.  His  task  was  rather  to  find  the  facts  and 
make  men  face  the  facts,  and  these  facts  he  held  to  be  such  as 
compel  in  some  form  or  other  a  doctrine  of  original  sin.  With  the 
moral  problem  which  he  stated,  modern  science  is  still  wrestling. 
But  there  is  little  or  no  tendency  among  sober  scientists  to-day  to 
question  the  ethical  presupposition  which  Huxley  laid  down. 

Mr.  Wells  has  more  than  once  popularized  the  Romanes  Lec¬ 
ture  in  his  novels  and  semi-theological  tracts.  And  he  tells  us  quite 

68 


ORIGINAL  SIN 


candidly  that  this  life  force  in  the  struggle  for  existence  may  not 
be  deified — that  it  is  in  substance  a  sinister  and  ominous  thing. 
“The  forms  in  which  this  being  clothes  itself  bear  thorns  and 
fangs  and  claws,  are  soaked  with  poison  and  bright  with  threats  or 
allurements,  prey  slyly  or  openly  on  one  another,  hold  their  own 
for  a  little  while,  breed  savagely  and  resentfully,  and  pass.  .  .  .  ” 
So  far  have  we  come  from  John  Fiske.  And  this  advance  of  modern 
thought  is  nothing  but  a  circling  back  to  the  old  haunting  ob¬ 
session  of  a  fundamental  human  liability,  a  burden  of  corporate 
racial  guilt.  Huxley  and  Wells  and  all  such  preach  this  old  somber 
gospel  of  man’s  sinful  nature  with  a  conviction  and  terrible 
earnestness  unsurpassed  by  any  of  the  fathers.  The  language  they 
use  is  the  language  of  our  own  time,  but  their  central  message  to 
our  time  is  that  of  the  elders  to  the  earlier  time,  man  is  by  nature 
a  sinner  and  needs  salvation. 

The  modern  psychologist  in  his  study  of  human  instincts  is 
also  reverting  to  Calvinism.  The  best  that  he  can  say  for  our  in¬ 
stincts  is  that  they  are  the  nonmoral  sources  of  power  in  human 
nature.  Of  themselves  they  are  no  more  good  or  bad  than  any 
other  form  of  energy.  Left  to  themselves  uncontrolled  and  un¬ 
coordinated,  they  set  up  a  civil  warfare  in  our  natures,  disrupting 
and  destroying  the  house  of  flesh  and  spirit  they  ought  to  energize. 
There  is  always  potential  moral  evil  in  instincts  not  wrought  into 
some  central  harmony  by  a  good  will.  And  it  needs  but  a  little 
remitting  of  the  strong  hand  of  the  will  to  make  this  potential 
moral  evil  a  present  actuality. 

One  of  our  own  American  philosophers  has  just  written  of 
“Human  Nature  and  Its  Remaking.”  The  very  title  implies  an 
initial  unfavorable  verdict  upon  human  nature  in  the  raw.  For 
there  is  no  moral  necessity  to  remake  that  which  is  inherently 
and  inevitably  good  in  itself.  Every  idealism,  says  the  writer,  has 
its  origin  in  some  deprecatory  judgment  upon  the  primitive  human 
stuff  out  of  which  character  is  to  be  fashioned.  There  is  no  escape 
for  any  idealist  from  his  initial  dictum  that  there  is  in  this  welter 
of  human  instinct  some  maladjustment,  some  chaos  that  needs 
saving  and  solving.  The  names  which  we  give  to  the  facts  and  to 
the  remaking  process  he  regards  as  irrelevant.  But  he  insists  that 
upon  the  facts  themselves  we  shall  agree.  He  will  not  suffer  us  to 
put  away  the  doctrine  of  original  sin  as  a  childish  theological 

69 


THE  DISCIPLINES  OF  LIBERTY 


nightmare.  He  even  doubts  whether  this  somber  judgment  upon 
the  nature  of  man  is  primarily  a  product  of  theological  specula¬ 
tion.  He  shrewdly  suspects  it  to  be  an  inevitable  deduction  from 
the  life  of  humanity  as  a  whole  and  insists  that  it  has  “a  strong 
support  in  common  experience.”  The  modern  psychologist  is  essen¬ 
tially  a  Calvinist  when  he  surveys  the  chaos  of  human  instinct. 

But  there  marches  beside  this  modem  biological  and  psycho¬ 
logical  restatement  of  the  doctrine  of  original  sin  a  further  ex¬ 
pression  of  this  same  conviction  which  makes  an  even  more  direct 
and  deeper  appeal  to  the  mind  of  to-day.  That  is  the  conception 
of  man,  not  so  much  a  sinner  in  nature,  as  a  sinner  through 
society.  It  is  through  the  voice  of  the  social  conscience  that  Cal¬ 
vinism  finds  its  most  adequate  expression  in  this  present  time. 

The  social  conscience  is  by  no  means  a  discovery  of  the  nine¬ 
teenth  and  twentieth  centuries.  It  is  a  fair  question  whether  it 
has  ever  been  absent  from  simple  Christian  piety  at  its  best.  The 
rank  individualism  of  the  Anglo-Saxon  temperament,  and  of  the 
ultra-Protestant  attitude  suppressed  it  for  generations  in  our 
English-speaking  world.  But  exact  and  entirely  adequate  state¬ 
ments  of  its  central  position  can  be  found  all  through  Christian 
history.  aPiers  Plowman”  is  nothing  but  a  tract  on  the  social 
conscience,  written,  indeed,  over  six  hundred  years  ago,  but  essen¬ 
tially  true  to  the  modern  form.  Behind  the  institution  of  volun¬ 
tary  poverty  which  inspired  most  of  the  lay  brotherhood  move¬ 
ments  of  the  two  centuries  before  the  Reformation  lay  a  sensitive 
social  conscience.  John  Woolman’s  “Journal”  is  nothing  but  a 
study  in  the  agonized  conscience  of  a  single  sensitive  individual 
following  the  social  implications  of  his  life  to  their  sources  and 
their  consequences.  The  thing  is  not  new. 

But  the  social  conscience  has  come  into  a  prominence  in  our 
own  time  never  so  widely  and  deeply  felt  before,  and  its  im¬ 
portance  for  theology  lies  in  the  fact  that  it  must  now  do  major 
duty  as  the  vehicle  for  that  strange  sense  of  original  sin  which 
men  seem  always  to  have  felt  in  some  form  or  other.  What  did 
the  fathers  mean,  at  bottom,  by  their  doctrine  of  original  sin? 
Let  Mr.  Wells  answer  in  the  person  of  Mr.  Britling,  who,  learning 
to  drive  his  new  automobile,  had  all  but  killed  a  hapless  cyclist, 
and  thus  soliloquizes: 


70 


ORIGINAL  SIN 


“This  last  folly  was  surely  the  worst.  To  charge  through  this 
patient  world  with — how  much  did  the  car  weigh?  A  ton  certainly 
and  perhaps  more — reckless  of  every  risk.  Not  only  to  himself 
but  to  others.  Once  more  he  saw  the  bent  back  of  the  endangered 
cyclist,  and  then  through  a  long  instant  he  drove  helplessly  at 
the  wall.  .  .  . 

Hell  perhaps  is  only  one  such  incident,  indefinitely  prolonged. 
.  .  .  Anything  might  have  been  there  in  front  of  him. 

‘Good  God!’  he  cried,  ‘if  I  had  hit  a  child!  I  might  have  hit  a 
child.’  .  .  . 

But  this  was  not  fair!  He  had  hurt  no  child!  .  .  . 

It  wasn’t  his  merit  that  the  child  hadn’t  been  there. 

The  child  might  have  been  there! 

Mere  luck. 

If  he  had  not  crushed  a  child  other  people  had.  Such  things 
happened.  Vicariously  at  any  rate  he  had  crushed  many  chil¬ 
dren.  .  .  . 

Why  are  children  ever  crushed? 

And  suddenly  all  the  pain  and  destruction  and  remorse  of  all 
the  accidents  in  the  world  descended  upon  Mr.  Britling. 

He  became  Man  on  the  automobile  of  civilization  crushing  his 
thousands  daily  in  his  headlong  yet  aimless  career.  .  .  . 

This  was  a  trick  of  Mr.  Britling’s  mind.  It  had  this  tendency  to 
spread  outward  from  himself  to  generalised  issues.  Many  minds 
are  like  that  nowadays.  He  was  not  so  completely  individualised 
as  people  are  supposed  to  be  individualised — in  our  law,  in  our 
stories,  in  our  moral  judgments.  He  had  a  vicarious  factor.  He 
could  slip  from  concentrated  reproaches  to  the  liveliest  remorse 
for  himself  as  the  Automobilist  in  General,  or  for  himself  as  Eng- 
land,  or  for  himself  as  Man.  From  remorse  for  smashing  his  guest 
and  his  automobile  he  could  pass,  by  what  was  for  him  the  most 
imperceptible  of  transitions,  to  remorse  for  every  accident  that  has 
ever  happened  through  the  error  of  an  automobilist  since  auto¬ 
mobiles  began.  All  that  long  succession  of  blunderers  became 
Mr.  Britling.  Or  rather  Mr.  Britling  became  all  that  vast  succes¬ 
sion  of  blunderers.” 

It  would  be  difficult  to  find  in  modern  literature,  theological  or 
otherwise,  a  more  entirely  adequate  account  of  what  the  sense 

7i 


THE  DISCIPLINES  OF  LIBERTY 


of  original  sin  actually  is  when  stated  in  the  terms  of  the  moral 
consciousness  of  the  twentieth  century.  Mr.  Britling  did  prevent 
the  night  watches  with  these  sober  reflections.  Sir  Oliver  Lodge 
to  the  contrary,  he  lay  awake  worrying  about  his  Sin,  not  the 
concrete  actuality,  but  the  potentiality  new  with  each  day  he  took 
the  wheel  of  his  car,  and  wide  as  his  vicarious  sense  of  being  the 
Automobilist-at-Large.  That  he  missed  the  cyclist  was  a  minor 
happy  accident  which  in  no  way  mitigated  his  daily  social  burden 
of  “original  sin.” 

If  the  modern  novel  strikes  this  penitential  note  of  the  agonized 
conscience,  the  modern  drama  strikes  it  even  more  effectively.  No 
one  who  has  ever  read  or  seen  Galsworthy’s  “Justice,”  for  example, 
is  left  without  a  sense  of  social  guilt.  Josiah  Royce  once  said  that 
when  he  met  a  wooden  mind  he  felt  “bitterly  ashamed”  that 
he  lived  in  a  world  where  truth  could  be  made  so  dull  and  unin¬ 
teresting.  One  closes  the  cover  or  leaves  the  theater  after  the  last 
act  of  “Justice”  bitterly  ashamed  that  one  lives  in  a  world  where 
such  cruel  injustices  prevail.  Galsworthy  is  essentially  a  Calvinist 
in  the  stuff  of  his  agonized  social  conscience,  and  he  preaches  to 
the  present  age  the  doctrine  of  corporate  social  sin  with  tremen¬ 
dous  effectiveness. 

But  in  many  ways  the  most  effective  modern  spokesman  for 
the  elder  theology  is  George  Bernard  Shaw.  The  play-going,  play¬ 
reading  world  is  divided  into  three  parts.  One  part  insists  upon 
treating  Shaw  as  a  buffoon.  Another  part  regards  him  as  the  high 
priest  of  a  new  religion.  While  a  third  part  is  always  irritated  and 
angered  by  Shaw.  Neither  of  the  first  two  reactions  are  what 
Shaw  himself  seeks  for  his  work.  He  wishes  to  be  taken  seriously, 
indeed,  but  not  solemnly.  The  laugh  is  always  there  and  Shaw 
is  too  adroit  a  humorist  to  wish  us  to  miss  it.  But  what  he  is 
really  trying  to  do  is  to  wound  the  vanity  and  self-complacency 
of  our  modem  world. 

Bishop  Creighton  used  to  say  that  after  we  have  gotten  rid  of 
the  ape  and  the  tiger  we  shall  have  to  dispose  of  the  donkey,  “a 
much  more  intractable  animal.”  Shaw  is  willing  to  leave  the 
problem  of  the  ape  and  the  tiger  to  the  keepers  of  the  ethical  zoo. 
His  mission  is  to  run  down  the  donkey-at-large  in  us  all.  This 
stupid  domestic  brute  is  quite  as  much  a  moral  problem  as  his 

72 


ORIGINAL  SIN 


companions  of  the  jungle.  Indeed,  as  modern  society  is  organized, 
he  is  a  good  deal  more  of  a  problem. 

The  method  in  Shaw’s  madness  always  needs  a  little  explana¬ 
tion.  He  tells  us  that  in  the  old  days  the  Court  Jester  enjoyed 
certain  immunities  not  granted  to  the  sober  courtiers.  He  was 
the  only  man  in  the  Kingdom  who  was  allowed  to  talk  treason 
and  he  was  given  this  license  because  it  would  have  been  danger¬ 
ous  to  admit  that  he  was  sane.  The  Court  Jester  was  an  invaluable 
institution  because  he  was  the  one  source  of  moral  perspective  in 
the  kingdom  who  prevented  His  Majesty  from  losing  his  sense  of 
proportion.  He  was  the  touch  of  the  finiteness  and  pathos  of  all 
kings  and  kingdoms  which  always  saved  the  doctrine  of  the 
divinity  of  kings  from  overstepping  its  limits. 

Because  there  are  some  things  which  must  be  said  in  this  world, 
and  yet  cannot  be  said  by  a  sober  man  without  charge  of  heresy 
and  treason,  Shaw  has  appointed  himself  Court  Jester  to  His 
Majesty  The  Average  Man  in  the  modern  world.  Shaw  is  willing 
to  play  the  mountebank,  not  merely  because  the  role  is  a  con¬ 
genial  one,  but  because  he  can  say  from  beneath  the  cap  and  bells 
some  things  that  men  would  not  hear  from  any  other  source. 

Shaw’s  initial  attack  upon  our  age  is  a  wholesale  condemnation 
of  the  Romantic  movement,  and  by  Romanticism  he  means  not 
that  movement  in  its  purity  and  depth  of  early  feeling,  but  in  its 
modern  and  decadent  forms  of  sentimentalism  and  neopaganism. 
He  does  not  hesitate  to  identify  himself  with  the  old  Puritan 
theology.  He  writes  plays  for  Puritans  and  sounds  a  rallying  call 
to  a  modern  Puritanism,  to  a  new  intellectual  and  moral  sincerity. 
What  angers  him,  ethically,  about  modern  civilization  is  its  insin¬ 
cerity,  its  worship  under  the  guise  of  romantic  virtue  of  bestial 
and  brutal  ideals.  Like  Huxley  he  prefers  the  elder  theology  to 
the  modem  because  it  was  more  honest  in  facing  and  naming  facts. 
He  sees  the  innuendo  of  the  twin-bed  farce  and  the  musical  revue 
leading  straight  to  Mrs.  Warren’s  profession,  and  if  prostitution 
is  what  the  modem  author  and  play-goer  mean,  he  prefers  that 
they  should  say  so  in  so  many  words.  He  is  essentially  a  spokes¬ 
man  for  the  ethical  realism  of  the  Calvinist  outlook  on  life,  as 
against  the  romantic  Pharisaism  of  our  time  which  would  sanction 
its  license  by  a  cheap  and  easy  appeal  to  the  theory  that  to  the 
pure  all  things  are  pure. 


73 


THE  DISCIPLINES  OF  LIBERTY 


Shaw  is  no  prude.  He  is  not  unwilling  that  a  candid  sensuality 
should  have  its  Rabelaisian  horse  laugh.  He  has  no  moral  quarrel 
with  Falstaff  or  Doll  Tearsheet,  because  they  say  exactly  what 
they  mean.  But  he  will  not  let  us  deify  the  decadent  erotic  motif. 
Mrs.  George,  the  Lady  Mayoress  of  “Getting  Married,”  is  not 
averse  to  an  occasional  flirtation ;  that  is  the  way  she  enlarges  her 
knowledge  of  human  life;  but  when  her  lover  proposes  to  enshrine 
their  idle  liaison  in  the  golden  casket  of  the  Paolo-Francesca, 
Lancelot- Guinevere  tradition  she  will  have  none  of  it.  “If  I  got 
anxious  about  George’s  health  and  I  thought  it  would  nourish 
him,  I  would  fry  you  with  onions  for  his  breakfast  and  think 
nothing  of  it.”  Very  few  illicit  romances  can  survive  this  odor 
for  any  length  of  time.  Shaw  really  prefers  the  moral  aroma  of 
fried  onions  to  that  of  attar  of  roses.  And  he  would  subject  all 
modern  morality  to  this  pungent  proving.  The  romance  of  war, 
the  romance  of  justice,  the  romance  of  vengeance,  are  spots  of 
moral  horror  in  Shaw’s  world  because  he  senses  in  them  all 
fundamental  insincerities  which  are  wanting  in  the  old  Calvinist 
scheme  of  things,  which  for  all  its  harshness  called  things  by  their 
right  names.  He  would  have  us  get  away  from  the  muddy  self- 
righteousness  of  the  sentimentalist,  and  go  back  to  the  sharp 
ethical  distinctions  of  the  realist.  His  initial  temper  is  that  of  a 
hundred  and  fifty  years  ago,  not  of  our  own  time,  and  that  is  why 
he  seems  such  an  anachronism. 

When  Shaw  turns  from  the  moral  peril  of  the  diffuse  and  de¬ 
cadent  sentimentality  of  modern  civilization  to  its  specific  social 
sins,  his  agonized  conscience  speaks  even  more  clearly,  and  his 
burden  of  original  sin  is  perfectly  intelligible.  Behind  the  buffoon 
there  is  a  prophet,  who  in  his  own  perverse  and  arbitrary  way  is 
bent  upon  one  thing  above  all  else,  to  play  Nathan  to  King 
Demos.  He  finds  always  near  at  hand  some  modern  Pharisee 
standing  in  self-righteous  satisfaction,  looking  with  scorn  upon 
the  sins  of  the  patent  rascals  of  the  day,  and  he  leaves  him  at 
the  end  of  his  drama  a  smitten  and  conscious  sinner.  He  puts  up 
the  glaring  offender  for  our  initial  condemnation,  the  Prussian 
militarist,  the  whiskey  king,  the  pimp,  the  panderer,  the  owner  of 
a  rotten  slum  block.  He  proceeds,  as  did  Nathan  and  Amos,  to 
rouse  our  moral  indignation  against  these  outlaws,  and  then  cast¬ 
ing  the  net  of  dramatic  action  around  us,  he  adroitly  and  with 

74 


ORIGINAL  SIN 


inevitable  logic  involves  us  in  their  sins  until  we  see  ourselves  as 
partners  in  one  or  another  of  these  nefarious  traffics.  He  forces 
us,  in  these  plays,  into  the  dilemma  where  he  can  wheel  about 
upon  us  and  say,  “Thou  art  the  man!”  Again  and  again  he  wrings 
from  the  mouth  of  the  Pharisee,  venting  his  solemn  indignation 
upon  the  patent  rascal,  the  final  surprised  and  utterly  humiliated 
confession,  “I  am  just  as  bad  as  you  are.” 

Would  you  know  what  original  sin  means  when  felt  and  stated 
in  the  terms  of  the  social  conscience?  Read  any  or  all  of  the  more 
serious  Shaw  plays. 

“Widower’s  Houses”  is  the  story  of  a  self-righteous  young 
doctor,  Trench,  who  falls  in  love  with  the  daughter  of  a  certain 
wealthy  Sartorius.  Trench  has  a  modest  income  of  only  seven 
hundred  pounds  a  year,  but  Sartorius  is  to  add  a  generous  allow¬ 
ance.  All  goes  well  until  Trench  discovers  that  Sartorius  is  agent 
for  some  of  the  worst  slums  in  London  and  that  the  money  his 
fiancee  is  to  bring  with  her  is  wrung  from  the  poor  of  the  tene¬ 
ments.  His  conscience  will  not  let  him  accept  such  tainted  money 
and  he  goes  to  Sartorius  to  state  the  case  and  to  break  the  en¬ 
gagement.  His  prospective  father-in-law  listens  with  interest  and 
then  asks  him  if  he  knows  anything  about  the  sources  of  his  own 
income.  Trench  replies  that  it  is  paid  him  as  an  annuity  from  a 
trust  fund,  but  that  it  is  perfectly  clean.  Sartorius  punctures  his 
self-righteousness  by  telling  him  that  the  whole  trust  fund  in 
question  is  invested  as  a  first  mortgage  on  the  slum  property  for 
which  he  is  agent.  Trench  is  left,  at  the  end  of  the  play,  to  grapple 
with  the  new  moral  problem  which  rises  from  the  discovery  that 
his  own  income  is  just  as  tainted  as  that  of  his  beloved. 

Vivie  Warren,  who  has  just  graduated  from  Cambridge  with 
high  mathematical  honors,  receives  a  proposal  of  marriage  from 
an  old  blackguard  who  turns  out  to  be  part  proprietor  in  a  chain 
of  “high-class”  brothels  in  the  capitals  of  Europe.  Vivie  rejects 
the  proposal  with  righteous  indignation.  Her  suitor  asks  her  how 
much  she  knows  about  her  mother.  She  has  to  answer  that  she 
knows  very  little,  her  mother  having  been  traveling  on  the  con¬ 
tinent  all  the  while  she  has  been  in  school  and  college.  She  is  told 
to  her  humiliation  that  her  mother  is  the  other  proprietor  in  these 
same  brothels,  and  that  she  need  not  refuse  in  moral  horror  the 
luxuries  offered  her  by  her  mother’s  partner,  since  all  her  oppor- 

75 


THE  DISCIPLINES  OF  LIBERTY 


tunities  for  years  had  been  given  her  at  the  price  of  the  shame 
of  her  sorrowful  sisters  in  society.  Where,  says  Crofts,  would  your 
Oxfords  and  your  Cambridges,  your  Girtons  and  Newnhams  be 
but  for  the  earnings  of  this  traffic  and  a  dozen  like  it?  Vivie 
Warren  is  left  at  the  last  a  long-time,  silent  partner  in  the  most 
sinister  traffic  of  the  time. 

Ferrovius,  of  “Androcles  and  the  Lion,”  prospective  Christian 
martyr  in  the  Roman  Arena,  finds  in  the  moment  of  his  trial  that 
his  giant  sword  arm  has  not  forsaken  him.  He  forgets  his  non¬ 
resisting  Master,  and  kills  six  gladiators  before  the  Emperor  can 
intervene.  He  discovers  to  his  sorrow  what  his  fellow  disciple 
Lavinia  had  already  told  him,  “You  know,  Ferrovius,  I  am  not 
always  a  Christian;  I  do  not  think  anybody  is.”  When  Caesar 
advances  him  on  the  spot  to  the  Praetorian  Guard,  he  answers: 
“In  my  youth  I  worshipped  the  god  Mars.  I  turned  from  him  to 
the  Christian  God,  but  to-day  the  Christian  God  forsook  me  and 
Mars  overcame  me  to  claim  his  own.  The  Christian  God  is  not  yet. 
He  will  come  when  Mars  and  I  are  dust;  but  meanwhile  I  will 
serve  the  gods  that  are,  not  the  gods  that  will  be.  Until  then,  I 
accept  service  in  the  guard,  Caesar.”  Shaw  will  not  suffer  any  of 
us  to  seek  solitary  and  self-righteous  exemption  from  the  total 
corporate  guilt  of  wars. 

Major  Barbara  hopes  to  ease  her  troubled  conscience  by  leaving 
a  home  of  luxury  in  the  West  End  which  lives  by  the  profits  of 
the  munitions  trade.  She  joins  the  Salvation  Army  in  the  East 
End.  A  bitter  winter  with  cold  and  hunger  falls  on  East  London. 
The  Army,  driven  to  desperation,  appeals  for  funds.  It  is  offered 
five  thousand  pounds  by  Bodger,  the  whiskey  distiller,  if  another 
five  thousand  can  be  raised.  Undershaft,  Barbara’s  father,  comes 
forward  with  the  second  five  thousand.  To  Barbara’s  sorrow  and 
humiliation  the  Army  has  no  scruples  about  accepting  the  total 
ten  thousand  from  whiskey  and  shells.  The  Army  apparently  has 
no  conscience,  for  it  cannot  afford  a  conscience.  Though  she  fly 
from  the  West  End  and  make  her  bed  in  the  East  End,  Barbara’s 
problem  follows  her  and  her  guilt  seeks  her  out.  She  leaves  the 
Army  in  sober  and  bitter  second  thought,  and  takes  a  job  in  her 
father’s  plant.  When  the  curtain  falls  it  falls  on  Barbara  under  the 
shadow  of  the  big  guns,  and  in  the  midst  of  the  moral  problem  of 
high  explosives.  In  other  words,  as  Shaw  has  it  in  the  blunt  prose 

76 


ORIGINAL  SIN 


of  his  preface  to  this  play,  “You  must  either  share  the  guilt  of 
this  world  or  go  to  another  planet.”  The  idea  that  there  is  to  be 
found  in  modern  society  clean  money  as  against  tainted  money 
Shaw  writes  down  as  an  exploded  individualist  superstition.  The 
whole  body  of  money  in  circulation  is  sullied  by  its  part  in  trans¬ 
actions  which  fall  short  of  moral  idealism.  It  touches  the  con¬ 
taminated  man  in  its  circulation,  it  takes  the  germs  of  moral 
infection  from  the  situation  through  which  it  passes,  and  it  brings 
to  us,  no  matter  how  it  reaches  us,  its  moral  liabilities,  its  con¬ 
tagion  of  social  injustice.  Shaw’s  central  thesis  is  this,  there  is  no 
longer  any  desert  to  which  the  individual  may  retire,  where  he  can 
cut  himself  loose  from  his  part  in  the  corporate  responsibility  of 
human  society  for  all  its  patent  evils  and  injustices.  Whatever 
your  task,  wherever  you  stand,  the  roots  of  your  life  reach  down 
so  deep  and  out  so  far  into  society  as  a  whole,  that  your  life 
becomes  hopelessly  intertwined  with  the  tangled  mesh  of  the  sins 
of  society.  The  better  you  know  yourself  and  your  circumstances 
the  more  clearly  you  see  yourself  to  be  guilty  of  “original  sin,” 
a  moral  partner  in  all  the  major  evils  of  the  time. 

Beyond  these  sins  of  social  commission  there  are  those  sins  of 
social  omission,  only  half  sensed,  which  really  bulk  so  large  in  the 
life  of  comfortable  and  complacent  men  and  women  to-day.  The 
burden  of  this  form  of  moral  failure  can  never  be  wholly  absent 
from  the  sensitive  conscience.  Such  is  the  sin  of  all  those  who  take 
their  ease  in  Zion,  unmindful  of  the  fatherless  and  the  widow. 

At  Vesper  tide 

One  virtuous  and  pure  in  heart  did  pray, 

“Since  none  I  wronged  in  deed  or  word  to-day 
From  whom  should  I  crave  pardon,  Master,  say?” 

A  voice  replied, 

“From  the  sad  child  whose  play  thou  hast  not  planned, 

The  goaded  heart  whose  friend  thou  didst  not  stand, 

The  rose  that  died  for  water  from  thine  hand.” 

“Inasmuch  as  ye  did  it  not  unto  one  of  the  least  of  these 
My  brethren,  ye  did  it  not  unto  me.” 

If  the  Christian  preacher  fails  to  discern  the  reappearance  of 
the  old,  persistent,  agonized  conscience  of  the  human  race,  not  in 
the  now  antiquated  terms  of  the  Pauline  theology,  but  in  these 

77 


THE  DISCIPLINES  OF  LIBERTY 


contemporary  voices  of  modern  science,  fiction,  drama  and  verse, 
he  misses  one  of  his  signal  opportunities  to  preach  the  central 
Christian  doctrine  of  salvation. 

The  deeper  ministry  of  the  religions  of  salvation  looks  not  so 
much  to  the  deliverance  of  the  individual  sinner  from  his  specific 
dilemmas  as  to  the  redemption  of  his  whole  human  status.  That 
is  why  Christianity  never  can  subscribe  to  the  monastic  solution 
of  the  problem  of  evil.  A  religion  which  proffers  me  salvation  but 
leaves  my  world  unsaved  can  be  no  true  religion  for  me  to-day. 
I  can  only  be  saved  in  so  far  as  I  am  saved  in  and  with  my  race 
and  age  as  a  whole.  And  if  it  comes  to  the  choice  there  are  many 
passionately  earnest  men  in  the  world  to-day  who  would  choose 
to  go  to  hell  with  the  majority  rather  than  to  heaven  with  the 
minority,  simply  because  the  sense  of  participation  for  better  or 
for  worse  in  the  major  lot  of  the  race  is  our  deepest  source  of 
spiritual  satisfaction.  In  other  words,  the  habitat  of  a  moral 
minority  cannot  be  heaven  for  us. 

Meanwhile  our  religion  which  looks  to  nothing  short  of  the  re¬ 
demption  of  the  sinner’s  total  human  status  in  nature  and  in 
society  can  well  afford  to  take  up  the  intimations  of  “original  sin” 
to  be  found  in  all  these  extra-ecclesiastical  sources  and  carry  them 
on  to  their  fulfillment  in  the  sincerely  penitential  spirit. 

Shaw  is  a  moral  diagnostician,  he  is  not  a  moral  penitent  in  any 
characteristically  religious  sense  of  the  word.  It  is  in  John  Wool- 
man,  in  Tolstoi,  that  one  finds  the  profoundly  penitential  note. 
The  Psalmist  and  the  Hebrew  prophet  are  needed  to  make  spiritu¬ 
ally  urgent  the  facts  discovered  by  the  biologist  and  the  dramatist. 

We  have  invoked  in  the  past  few  years  the  prophetic  ideal  of 
righteousness  as  the  granite  foundation  of  human  society.  We 
have  preached  the  Old  Testament  gospel  of  justice  because  it  has 
been  so  hard  to  preach  the  New  Testament  gospel  of  love.  Each 
of  us  in  his  own  way  has  profited  by  the  tonic  of  Hebraism.  What 
the  mind  of  Christ  may  have  to  say  to  the  more  bloodthirsty 
preaching  from  the  vast  majority  of  Christian  pulpits  over  these 
latter  years  only  time  can  tell.  One  is  reminded  of  Hardy’s  remark 
that  a  century  ago  the  churches  of  England  substituted  hatred  of 
Napoleon  for  the  love  of  God! 

But  even  if  we  rest  the  case  for  the  modern  church  during  the 
War  and  post-war  troubles  primarily  upon  the  Old  rather  than 

78 


ORIGINAL  SIN 


the  New  Covenant,  it  is  still  perfectly  clear  that  we  have  fallen 
short  of  the  total  moral  message  of  the  Hebrew  lawgiver  and 
prophet.  We  have  been  willing  to  play  Amos  in  our  denunciation 
of  the  sins  of  the  nations  round.  We  have  been  very  loath  to  follow 
Amos  to  an  equally  clear  confession  of  our  own  sins.  The  imme¬ 
diate  aims  of  the  temporal  kingdoms  are  not  always  best  served 
by  the  penitential  mood.  That  mood  does  not  strengthen  the 
hands  of  the  men  of  war,  or  of  big  business,  or  of  anarchic  pur¬ 
pose.  One  still  looks  in  vain,  as  one  has  looked  through  all  these 
recent  years,  for  any  appreciable  spirit  of  repentance.  There  has 
been  international  recrimination  without  stint,  there  has  been 
mutual  criticism  between  the  classes.  The  truculent  and  abusive 
voice  has  gained  its  followers  by  the  thousands  while  the  pro¬ 
foundly  prophetic  summons  to  repentance  has  gathered  only  its 
handful.  After  all,  Huxley,  Tolstoi,  Galsworthy,  Shaw,  are  at  the 
best  voices  crying  in  a  moral  wilderness.  And  though  an  increas¬ 
ing  number  of  men  admit  the  truth  of  their  ethical  indictment  of 
the  status  of  the  average  man,  our  age  is  still  too  inert  and  com¬ 
fortable  to  let  these  known  facts  sting  us  into  any  moral  action. 

It  is  very  hard  to  find  on  the  present  horizon  any  signs  which 
indicate  that  the  Kingdom  of  the  Heavens  is  to  dawn  to-morrow. 
Once  more  the  apocalyptic  hope  of  the  imminent  Kingdom  is  dis¬ 
pelled.  Again  Christ’s  Kingdom  is  as  a  man  journeying  into  a  far 
country.  But  if  this  Kingdom  tarries,  its  tarrying  is  somehow 
bound  up  with  the  untroubled  self-righteousness  of  the  crowd. 
The  voices  of  the  politician,  the  class  agitator,  the  maker  of  plat¬ 
forms  and  treaties  are  still  strident  with  Pharisaism.  There  has 
not  been  over  the  past  six  years  and  there  is  not  now  a  single 
official  voice  in  Christendom  which  has  begun  to  rise  to  the  moral 
level  that  Lincoln  reached  in  the  Second  Inaugural.  That  address 
is  fitly  called  the  greatest  state  paper  of  the  nineteenth  century. 
The  twentieth  century  has  produced  nothing  as  yet,  even  out  of 
the  agony  and  bloody  sweat  of  a  Gethsemane  fiercer  than  the 
Civil  War,  which  approximates  to  the  spiritual  austerity  of  Lin¬ 
coln’s  major  utterances.  That  nobility  of  his  rested,  not  so  much 
upon  his  brief  for  the  justice  of  God  in  history,  as  upon  his  appeal 
to  the  penitential  temper  in  his  own  race  and  nation. 

We  need  in  the  Christian  pulpit  to-day  a  full  and  candid  use  of 
all  that  modern  science  and  modern  literature  have  done  to  restate 

79 


THE  DISCIPLINES  OF  LIBERTY 


the  doctrine  of  original  sin  in  intelligible  and  credible  terms,  that 
we  may  press  home  to  men  their  lost  and  needy  state,  their  oppor¬ 
tunity  for  repentance  and  their  prospect  of  forgiveness  and  sal¬ 
vation.  In  no  other  way  is  there  the  slightest  hope  that  the  years 
immediately  before  us  are  to  be  in  any  real  way  more  truly  the 
days  of  the  Son  of  Man  than  the  years  immediately  behind  us. 

The  tumult  and  the  shouting  dies, 

The  captains  and  the  kings  depart. 

Still  stands  thine  ancient  sacrifice, 

An  humble  and  a  contrite  heart. 


8o 


CHAPTER  V. 


Is  Christianity  Practicable? 


How  very  hard  it  is  to  be 
A  Christian!  Hard  for  you  and  me, 

Not  the  mere  task  of  making  real 
That  duty  up  to  its  ideal, 

Effecting  thus  complete  and  whole, 

A  purpose  for  the  human  soul — 

For  that  is  always  hard  to  do; 

But  hard  I  mean  for  me  and  you 
To  realize  it  more  or  less, 

With  even  the  moderate  success 
Which  commonly  repays  our  strife 
To  carry  out  the  aims  of  life. 

ROBERT  BROWNING  wrote  these  familiar  words  in  1850. 
They  were  strangely  prophetic  of  the  whole  drift  of 
^subsequent  religious  thought.  In  other  days  men  asked, 
“Is  Christianity  credible?”  But  for  the  past  half  century,  and 
to-day  with  increasing  perplexity,  men  are  asking,  “Is  Christianity 
practicable?” 

The  gospel  of  Jesus  can  never  be  presented  to  men,  in  its  in¬ 
tegrity,  as  an  easy  vocation.  From  the  first,  even  in  the  realms  of 
purely  private  virtue,  its  appeal  has  been  to  the  athletic,  ardent 
and  sacrificial  impulses  of  the  human  soul.  The  author  of  our 
faith  and  all  his  noblest  mediators  down  the  centuries  have  had  a 
baffling  way  of  welcoming  “each  rebuff  that  turns  earth’s  smooth¬ 
ness  rough.”  This  personal  struggle  has  kept  the  soul  of  Chris¬ 
tianity  alive.  A  traveler  once  stopped  at  the  door  of  a  mediaeval 
hermit’s  cell  and  asked  him  how  it  was  with  the  lust  of  the  flesh. 
The  old  man  answered,  “It  knocketh  but  it  passeth  on.”  In  those 
words  was  the  whole  long  history  of  a  solitary  discipline,  the  world 
forgetting  and  by  the  world  forgot,  which  took  no  count  of  what 
we  call  the  modern  social  gospel,  and  yet  was  in  its  own  way  part 
of  the  central  effort  of  the  Christian  life. 

81 


THE  DISCIPLINES  OF  LIBERTY 


There  is  a  familiar  type  of  Christianity  which  would  confine 
itself  severely  to  the  development  of  private  piety  and  would 
deliberately  ignore  the  wider  implications  of  the  Christian  ethic. 
This  type  at  its  lowest  is  represented  by  those  survivors  of  Puritan 
individualism  who  content  themselves  with  a  rather  arid  impecca¬ 
bility  in  private  life,  but  who  have  no  interest  in  the  social  content 
of  Christianity.  They  are  ethical  bimetallists.  They  try  to  put 
their  personal  character  in  its  narrower  contacts  beyond  the  reach 
of  criticism,  and  they  deprecate  what  they  consider  the  slur  cast 
upon  private  piety  by  a  wide  concern  for  the  Christian  status  of 
society.  At  its  best  and  noblest  this  type  is  represented  by  Tolstoi, 
who  said  quite  flatly,  “The  Christian  teaching  does  not  prescribe 
any  laws  for  all  men,  but  explains  to  each  separate  man  his  posi¬ 
tion  in  the  world  and  shows  him  what  for  him  personally  results 
from  that  position.”  The  traditional  individualism  of  the  whole 
Protestant  interpretation  of  the  religious  life  has  contributed  to 
this  point  of  view.  The  fluid  conceptions  of  personality,  which 
prevailed  when  the  Christian  faith  was  first  formulated,  are  alien 
to  the  whole  Anglo-Saxon  temperament,  which  holds  doggedly  by 
its  doctrine  of  the  impenetrable  ego,  and  which  looks  with  tem¬ 
peramental  disfavor  upon  any  mystical  theories  of  the  relation  of 
the  individual  to  society  and  to  God.  There  are  still  in  our  modern 
Western  Christendom  vast  numbers  of  earnest  persons  who  cling 
to  the  conviction  that  a  man’s  sole  moral  duty,  to  use  the  homely 
vernacular  of  one  of  them,  is  to  “tidy  up  his  own  front  yard.” 

Against  this  point  of  view  what  we  call  the  social  gospel  is  in 
revolt.  Like  all  revolutions  it  has  swung  to  the  other  extreme  and 
may  occasionally  overstate  its  own  case.  There  is,  in  the  youth 
of  to-day,  a  certain  cavalier  indifference  to  private  piety  going 
hand  in  hand  with  a  genuine  concern  for  the  corporate  aspects  of 
the  Christian  life  which  perplexes  and  troubles  the  older  genera¬ 
tion.  The  fathers  find  it  hard  to  believe  that  the  sons  who  seem 
so  lax  in  their  standards  of  private  morality  can  be  sincere  in 
their  preoccupation  with  social  problems.  They  suspect  the  moral 
integrity  of  the  oncoming  generation,  which  plays  fast  and  loose 
with  the  blue  laws  at  the  same  time  that  it  professes  to  suffer 
moral  distress  over  the  existence  of  slums  and  child  labor  and  the 
like.  We  shall  eventually  have  to  strike  some  moral  mean  between 
these  two  extremes.  If  the  elder  type  of  moral  individualism  was 

82 


IS  CHRISTIANITY  PRACTICABLE? 

'# 

too  provincial  in  its  conception  of  the  Christian  life,  the  modern 
type  may  well  become  too  vague  and  impersonal.  The  social 
gospel  is  in  a  fair  way  to  develop  a  breed  of  Christians  who  face 
every  moral  challenge  with  the  evasion,  “Lord,  and  what  wilt  thou 
have  the  social  order  to  do?”  In  the  last  analysis  the  answer  to 
this  question  runs  true  to  the  old  form,  “If  I  will  that  the  social 
order  tarry  till  I  come,  what  is  that  to  thee?  follow  thou  me.”  In 
its  extremer  forms  the  social  gospel  is  open  to  just  as  grave  abuses 
as  the  rank  individualism  of  Puritanism.  The  burden  of  social 
obligation  when  overoppressive  may  end  in  moral  discouragement 
and  indifference,  and  these  vaster,  vaguer  considerations  may  be¬ 
come  for  us  a  city  of  moral  refuge  where  we  seek  shelter  from  the 
accusations  and  inspirations  of  our  own  intimate  conscience,  which 
in  the  last  analysis  always  dares  us  to  step  out  from  the  ranks  into 
some  prophetic  and  pioneering  solitude. 

Between  these  two  extremes  the  mind  of  the  normal  Christian 
oscillates.  At  one  moment  we  feel  the  validity  of  the  dogged  indi¬ 
vidualism  of  the  fathers,  the  reckless  solitude  of  a  Tolstoi,  and 
at  another  moment  we  feel  the  truth  of  the  dictum  that  we  never 
can  be  saved  apart  from  the  Beloved  Community  and  that  this 
Beloved  Community  is  potential  in  the  world  where  we  do  our 
work  and  live  our  lives.  But  it  is  perfectly  clear,  whatever  mean 
may  be  struck  between  these  two  extremes,  or  whatever  compre¬ 
hensive  conception  of  the  Christian  life  may  finally  embrace  them 
both,  that  the  individual  problems  of  discipleship  cannot  be  dis¬ 
sociated,  in  this  generation,  from  their  social  setting.  “Tidying 
up  our  own  front  yard,”  put  it  how  we  will,  is  a  larger  task  than 
it  used  to  be  in  the  days  when  every  man’s  front  yard  was  clearly 
defined  by  a  picket  fence.  Picket  fences  are  to-day  the  sign  of 
provincialism.  They  tend  more  and  more  to  disappear  from  our 
yards  and  our  ethics.  For  every  man  there  is  a  dubious  borderland 
where  his  estate  abuts  upon  his  neighbor’s  estate  or  upon  the 
common  highway,  and  moral  tidiness  demands  a  certain  gener¬ 
osity  and  community  spirit  in  the  definition  of  its  task. 

What  gives  to  the  Christian  religion  as  a  moral  program  its 
poignant  perplexity  is  the  conviction  that  one  never  can  be  a 
Christian  in  the  full  and  perfect  sense  of  the  word,  in  the  world 
as  it  now  is.  With  the  best  will  in  the  world  many  of  the  major 
Christian  impulses  seem  to  be  thwarted  and  rendered  ineffectual 

83 


THE  DISCIPLINES  OF  LIBERTY 


by  the  existing  order.  And  it  is  the  discouragement,  born  of  this 
sense  of  maladjustment,  which  creates  for  the  normal  Christian  of 
to-day  his  graver  moral  problem. 

We  have,  for  example,  from  the  mind  of  Christ  a  religion  which 
is  characterized  above  all  else  by  its  insistence  upon  “love”  as 
the  plainest  of  its  hall-marks  and  the  finest  of  its  graces.  We 
sorely  need  some  new  word  to  translate  the  gospel  original.  The 
hard-worked  Anglo-Saxon  term  “love”  does  duty  for  three  or 
four  words  in  the  ancient  tongues  which  ranged  in  meaning  all 
the  way  from  an  almost  passionless  and  impersonal  devotion, 
through  the  realms  of  Platonic  friendship,  to  a  candid  eroticism. 
At  present  the  word  “love”  is  too  sicklied  over  with  sentimental¬ 
ism  to  be  of  much  service  to  the  gospel  idea.  It  was  not  until  the 
third  or  fourth  century  that  the  language  of  eroticism  entered  into 
the  symbolism  of  the  Christian  life,  and  its  entry  is  generally 
admitted  to  be  a  sign  of  decadence.  The  idea  which  inspired  Jesus 
and  Paul  was  much  nearer  what  we  mean  by  loyalty  or  a  great 
good  will.  To  rescue  the  conception  of  agape  from  its  cloying 
associations  is  part  of  the  office  of  the  Christian  preacher  to-day. 
Nietzsche’s  revolt  against  Christianity,  in  so  far  as  it  was  a  pro¬ 
test  against  sentimentalism,  was  entirely  valid. 

May  we  say  broadly  that  the  Christian  motive  of  love  implies 
a  cooperative  view  of  human  life?  Its  central  dictum  is  its  state¬ 
ment  that  all  we  are  brothers,  members  one  of  another,  that  virtue 
and  sin  are  both  “in  widest  commonalty  spread.”  But  over  against 
this  cooperative  view  of  life,  implied  by  the  Christian  ethic,  there 
stands  the  major  institution  of  competition,  which  generates  most 
of  the  social  energy  of  the  present  day,  and  by  which  success  and 
failure  are  measured. 

How  to  apply  a  cooperative  conception  of  life  to  competitive 
processes  and  to  express  the  one  adequately  through  the  other  is 
a  problem  which  may  well  baffle  the  shrewdest  casuist.  And  it  is 
just  because  the  social  machinery  of  the  day  in  trade  and  states- 
craft  and  war  seems  so  ill  fitted  to  express  the  central  Christian 
conviction  that  many  men  feel  that  Christianity  is  impracticable. 
The  would-be  Christian  of  to-day  is  much  in  the  position  of  a 
householder  who  moves  from  the  country  to  the  city.  He  has 
among  his  possessions  a  number  of  electrical  contrivances  built 
to  be  run  on  the  alternating  current  supplied  by  most  provincial 

84 


IS  CHRISTIANITY  PRACTICABLE? 


companies.  After  he  moves  into  the  city  he  finds  that  the  munici¬ 
pal  plant  furnishes  a  direct  current  and  when  he  plugs  in  his 
fixtures  nothing  happens.  He  must  either  buy  a  transformer, 
which  will  change  the  current,  or  else  he  must  scrap  his  fixtures 
and  buy  a  new  set  to  be  used  on  the  direct  current.  If  he  makes  his 
standard  of  electrical  excellence  the  devices  which  he  already  pos¬ 
sesses  he  must  conclude  that  the  direct  current  is  an  impracticable 
form  of  electrical  energy  and  will  condemn  it  as  useless. 

In  some  such  way  the  mind  of  the  modern  world  approaches  the 
Christian  religion.  Most  of  the  social  machinery  in  our  world  was 
built  to  be  operated  by  the  alternating  current  of  a  competitive 
view  of  life.  Connect  this  machinery  with  the  direct  current  of 
Christ’s  great  good  will,  his  utterly  cooperative  conception  of  the 
moral  life,  and  nothing  happens.  The  wheels  of  modem  business 
and  modern  war  stand  still.  The  energy  which  comes  direct  from 
the  mind  of  Christ  is  perfectly  helpless  so  far  as  many  if  not  most 
of  our  present  industrial  and  political  contrivances  are  concerned. 

It  would  be  a  real  help  to  the  clarification  of  our  religious  think¬ 
ing  if  we  would  admit  candidly  and  without  reservations,  that  in 
many  situations  Christianity  is  impracticable  to-day.  There  is  no 
moral  gain  in  simply  inspecting  the  wiring  and  polishing  the  con¬ 
tacts.  There  is  a  fundamental  discrepancy  which  might  as  well 
be  admitted.  For  when  a  man  makes  his  standard  of  moral  judg¬ 
ment  the  normal  competitive  institutions  of  modern  life,  and  in¬ 
sists  upon  testing  all  forms  of  spiritual  energy  by  them,  he  may  as 
well  rule  Christianity  out.  The  humane  spirit  which  emanates  from 
Jesus  may  limit  the  graver  abuses  of  competition,  and  may  seek 
to  safeguard  the  welfare  of  those  who  suffer  too  grievously  at  its 
hands,  but  so  long  as  the  competitive  view  of  life  is  accepted  as 
the  law  and  gospel  of  the  moral  life,  the  religion  of  Jesus  is  an 
impracticable  religion,  and  may  as  well  be  given  up.  The  logical 
consistency  of  the  Prussian  view  of  war  lay  in  its  perception  of 
this  fact,  even  when  it  did  grossest  wrong  to  those  dumb  humane 
instincts  in  our  nature  which  seem  always  to  be  in  revolt  against 
the  extreme  consequences  of  the  competitive  view  of  life.  The 
Prussians  were  logically  right,  even  though  they  turned  back  the 
clock  a  thousand  years  in  the  history  of  the  humane  spirit.  Bern- 
hardi  saw  clearly  that  the  ultimately  cooperative  view  of  human 
life  in  the  Christian  religion  could  not  be  turned  to  final  account 

85 


THE  DISCIPLINES  OF  LIBERTY 


in  the  waging  of  war,  therefore  he  had  no  hesitation  in  dismissing 
Jesus  as,  at  this  point,  an  impractical  man.  As  a  soldier  he  made 
no  profession  of  Christianity,  but  drove  his  machinery  by  the 
alternating  current  of  ruthless  competition. 

The  error  in  this  reasoning,  however,  lies  in  its  premise.  When 
we  say,  as  we  must  often  say  in  certain  clear-cut  competitive 
dilemmas,  the  Christian  religion  is  impracticable  in  this  connec¬ 
tion,  we  may  be  passing  judgment  on  our  existing  social  machinery 
even  more  truly  than  on  the  energy  of  the  gospel.  The  direct  cur¬ 
rent  of  the  municipal  electric  company  is  impracticable  only  to 
the  man  who  insists  upon  testing  its  value  and  validity  by  the 
provincial  machinery  he  brings  with  him.  If  he  is  willing  to  trans¬ 
form  the  current,  or  better  still,  to  equip  himself  with  a  fresh  set 
of  devices,  he  will  find  it  entirely  practicable.  His  first  snap  judg¬ 
ment  of  impracticability  is  quite  as  truly  a  judgment  on  himself 
and  his  own  devices  as  upon  the  form  of  power  he  cannot  utilize. 
The  same  thing  is  true  in  the  world’s  cavalier  judgments  of  the 
Christian  ethic.  An  impracticable  and  morally  impossible  situation 
arises  when  we  try  to  arbitrate  on  the  basis  of  the  gospel  a  strike 
which  has  gone  beyond  all  limits  of  mutual  understanding  and 
mutual  interests  and  has  become  a  simple  test  of  endurance  be¬ 
tween  capital  and  labor.  “Man,  who  made  me  a  divider  between 
you?”  Christianity  was  impracticable  in  that  concrete  dilemma 
with  which  Jesus  himself  was  confronted.  He  did  not  try  to 
pretend  that  it  was  otherwise.  He  gave  up  that  problem  as  having 
no  possible  Christian  solution. 

This  whole  argument,  then,  cuts  both  ways.  The  Christian 
preacher  would  do  well  to  follow  Jesus’  example  in  these  situations, 
and  not  assume  that  Christianity  is  always  practicable.  And  where 
the  world  says,  “So  much  the  worse,  then,  for  Christianity,”  he 
would  do  well  to  reply  with  equal  bluntness,  “So  much  the  worse 
for  your  competitive  view  of  life,  and  all  the  institutions  which 
live  by  it.” 

Moreover,  the  futility  of  passing  finally  upon  the  practica¬ 
bility  of  any  idea  on  the  basis  of  existing  usage  is  perfectly  clear 
when  one  reviews  the  history  of  the  world’s  great  discoveries  in 
the  pure  and  applied  sciences.  Under  the  tender  mercies  of  the 
Inquisition  Galileo  recanted  the  heresy  of  the  Copernican  as¬ 
tronomy.  The  “practical”-minded  Ptolemaics  were  too  strong  for 


IS  CHRISTIANITY  PRACTICABLE? 


his  old  age  and  growing  infirmity.  But  he  gave  to  every  theory 
judged  impracticable  by  its  own  time  its  one  priceless  text,  E 
pur  se  muove — “It  moves  for  all  that.”  There  probably  is  not  a 
single  characteristic  device  of  modern  civilization  which  did  not 
have  to  make  its  way  in  the  world  in  the  face  of  the  advance  dog¬ 
matic  statement  that  it  was  impracticable.  The  settled  hostility  of 
the  existing  order  to  any  proposition,  mechanical  or  moral,  which 
calls  for  a  radical  readjustment  of  life’s  methods  is,  perhaps,  the 
plainest  fact  on  the  pages  of  the  past. 

In  his  “History  of  the  United  States,”  McMasters  chronicles 
the  early  fortunes  of  some  of  the  now  accepted  commonplaces  of 
the  present  order.  In  their  own  first  time  they  all  had  to  run  the 
gauntlet  of  the  criticism  that  they  were  impracticable.  Of  Ark¬ 
wright’s  spinning- jenny  he  says:  “It  was  indeed  with  this  at  first 
as  with  every  great  invention,  from  the  alphabet  to  the  printing 
press,  from  the  printing  press  to  the  railroad,  from  the  railroad 
to  the  telegraph.  It  was  bitterly  opposed.  The  jennies  were  long 
operated  in  secret.  The  life  of  the  inventor  was  threatened.  On 
more  than  one  occasion  the  machines  were  broken  to  pieces  by 
an  angry  mob.”  So  with  the  steamboat.  “Fulton  in  1807  made  his 
trip  to  Albany  on  the  famous  Clermont,  and  used  it  as  a  passenger 
boat  till  the  end  of  the  year.  But  he  met  with  the  same  opposition 
which  in  our  time  we  have  seen  expended  on  the  telegraph  and 
sewing-machine,  and  which,  some  time  far  in  the  future,  will  be 
encountered  by  inventions  and  discoveries  of  which  we  have  not 
now  the  smallest  conception.  No  man  in  his  senses,  it  was  asserted, 
would  risk  his  life  in  such  a  fire  boat  as  the  Clermont  when  the 
river  was  full  of  good  packets.”  Alexander  Hamilton  met  similar 
opposition  when  in  1791  he  launched  his  plan  for  the  Federal 
Bank.  There  were  at  that  time  only  four  banks  in  the  United 
States,  but  in  the  four  cities  where  these  banks  existed  “Five  men 
out  of  ten  had  nothing  to  put  in  them.  Of  those  who  had,  some 
were  deterred  from  making  deposits  by  the  recollection  that 
their  fathers  had  never  done  so  before  them,  others  by  the  strong 
antipathy  which  they  felt  for  banks  in  general.  The  old  way,  they 
said,  of  doing  business  was  good  enough.  If  a  man  were  prosperous 
and  had  cash  to  spare,  the  best  place  to  keep  it  was  in  his  own 
house  under  his  own  lock  and  key.” 

As  for  the  Constitution  of  the  United  States,  it  was  with  the 

87 


THE  DISCIPLINES  OF  LIBERTY 


greatest  difficulty  that  it  established  itself  in  the  face  of  the  bitter 
hostility  and  dismal  predictions  which  it  aroused.  It  seems  to  have 
been  regarded  by  the  Anti  federalists  of  that  day  much  as  the 
Covenant  of  the  League  of  Nations  has  been  regarded  by  the 
great  majority  of  Americans  to-day,  a  useless  and  Utopian  scheme. 
The  criticisms  visited  upon  it  were  precisely  those  which  in  the 
past  two  years  have  been  passed  upon  the  Covenant  as  an  ideal¬ 
istic  and  impracticable  program.  “The  sovereignty  of  the  States 
was  destroyed  in  its  most  precious  parts.  The  form,  indeed,  of  a 
republican  government  was  guaranteed  to  each  by  express  words; 
but  any  one  who  would  read  the  instrument  carefully,  and  not 
suffer  his  understanding  to  be  clouded  with  a  multitude  of  fine 
phrases  could  see  that  it  was  the  form,  and  not  the  substance 
that  was  promised.  The  most  baleful  results  were  certain  to 
come.  .  .  .  One  representative  for  thirty  thousand  men  is  too 
small.  .  .  .  The  prospect  in  Massachusetts  was  not  a  pleasing 
one.  John  Hancock,  the  Governor,  gave  the  constitution  but  luke¬ 
warm  support.  Samuel  Adams  was  strongly  opposed  to  it.  Dane, 
one  of  the  congressmen,  had  denounced  it  in  the  halls  of  Con¬ 
gress,  and  Gerry,  one  of  the  delegates  at  Philadelphia,  had  stoutly 
refused  to  sign  it.  .  .  .  Towards  the  Continental  Government 
all  of  the  thirteen  states  acted  precisely  as  if  they  were  dealing 
with  a  foreign  power.  In  truth,  one  of  the  truest  patriots  of  New 
England  had  not  been  ashamed  to  stand  up  in  the  Massachusetts 
House  of  Deputies  and  speak  of  the  Congress  of  the  States  as  a 
foreign  government.  To  him  the  smallest  interest  of  the  little 
patch  of  earth  he  called  his  native  state  was  of  far  more  impor¬ 
tance  than  the  greatest  interest  of  the  Confederation  of  States.” 
Such  were  the  Jeremiads  addressed  to  the  newborn  Federal 
Government. 

Altogether  the  charge  of  impracticability  against  the  Christian 
religion  is  simply  one  aspect  of  the  settled  opposition  of  the  exist¬ 
ing  order  to  any  program  which  means  radical  change  and  re¬ 
adjustment.  Seen  in  long  retrospect  it  has  been  just  those  more 
daring  visions  of  the  human  mind  in  invention  and  statescraft, 
dismissed  in  their  own  day  as  Utopian  and  revolutionary,  which 
have  lifted  and  advanced  society. 

“St.  Paul  complimented  his  Corinthian  converts,”  writes  Lord 
Bryce,  “on  their  ‘suffering  fools  gladly.’  It  is  hard  to  suffer  cranks 

88 


IS  CHRISTIANITY  PRACTICABLE? 


gladly,  for  they  are  impracticable  persons.  .  .  .Yet  they  ought 
to  be  borne  with,  for  the  propensity  to  mere  imitation  is  so 
common,  and  independence  of  thinking  is  so  rare,  that  much  must 
be  pardoned  to  those  who  break  the  monotony  of  ordinary  opinion. 
Moreover,  the  longer  we  are  in  politics,  the  more  do  we  realize 
that  our  judgment  is  fallible.  Practical  politicians  are  too  apt  to 
be  impatient  of  what  seems  unpractical.  Some  of  those  so-called 
cranks  for  whom  their  own  contemporaries  had  no  use,  proved  in 
the  end  to  have  been  the  pioneers  of  great  reforms.” 

And  the  reverse  side  of  this  shield  of  impracticability  has  been 
stated  by  Thomas  Hardy,  never  better: 

“Was  Yeobright’s  mind  well-proportioned?  No.  A  well  propor¬ 
tioned  mind  is  one  which  shows  no  particular  bias;  one  of  which 
we  may  safely  say  that  it  will  never  cause  its  owner  to  be  confined 
as  a  madman,  tortured  as  a  heretic,  or  crucified  as  a  blasphemer. 
Also,  on  the  other  hand,  that  it  will  never  cause  him  to  be  ap¬ 
plauded  as  a  prophet,  revered  as  a  priest,  or  exalted  as  a  king.  Its 
usual  blessings  are  happiness  and  mediocrity.  It  produces  the 
poetry  of  Rogers,  the  paintings  of  West,  the  spiritual  guidance  of 
Sumner;  enabling  its  possessors  to  find  their  way  to  wealth,  to 
wind  up  well,  to  step  with  dignity  off  the  stage,  to  die  comfortably 
in  their  beds,  and  to  get  the  decent  monument  which,  in  many 
cases,  they  deserve.” 

There  is  no  doubt  that  these  are  “the  people”  in  their  own  time, 
but  in  history  their  practical  wisdom  always  dies  with  them.  The 
Christian  religion  stands  to  lose  nothing,  in  long  historical  per¬ 
spective,  when  at  any  given  moment  men  declare  its  morality  to 
be  visionary  and  unpractical.  On  the  contrary,  it  thereby  takes  its 
place  with  those  movements  which  are  continually  remaking  and 
elevating  human  society  because  they  refuse  to  identify  human 
possibility  with  present  achievement.  The  Christian  counsels  to 
love,  forgiveness  and  the  like  may  often  be,  in  concrete  dilemmas, 
socially  impracticable.  They  simply  will  not  work  because  the 
conditions  in  which  the  moral  problem  is  stated  do  not  allow  of 
their  working  and  were  not  intended  to  utilize  them.  But  what  of 
it?  So  were  the  locomotive,  the  automobile,  the  aeroplane,  the 
wireless  telegraph  and  telephone  declared  impracticable  by  hard- 
headed  men  of  common  sense.  So  were  Democracy,  and  the  Con¬ 
stitution  of  the  United  States.  The  final  tale  of  human  history  is 

89 


THE  DISCIPLINES  OF  LIBERTY 


yet  to  tell.  Shaw  states  the  case  once  and  for  all  when  he  says, 
“In  short,  Christianity,  good  or  bad,  right  or  wrong,  must  per¬ 
force  be  left  out  of  the  question  in  human  affairs  until  it  is  made 
practically  applicable  to  them  by  complicated  political  devices.” 
The  task  for  the  social  gospel  is  not  the  direct  application  of  the 
Christian  idea  to  every  phase  of  the  existing  order,  but  the  de¬ 
liberate  construction  of  experimental  ventures  in  whole-hearted 
cooperation  which  alone  can  offer  to  the  gospel  of  Jesus  its 
opportunity  to  energize  the  social  mechanism. 

In  short,  the  practical  mind  fails  to  sense  in  this  whole  troubled 
maladjustment  the  plain  fact  that  what  gives  to  any  and  all 
idealisms  their  real  significance  is  precisely  their  impracticability 
at  the  present  moment.  In  this  respect  Christianity  does  not  stand 
apart  from  all  the  world’s  idealisms,  but  takes  its  place  as  one  of 
them,  the  major  of  them.  All  ardent  moral  effort  has  about  it  for 
the  moment  the  suggestion  of  impossibility.  The  dilemma  is 
bluntly  stated  by  A.  E.  Taylor,  in  his  “Problem  of  Conduct”: 

“Make  your  account  of  the  ethical  ideal  which  you  propose 
for  realization  within  your  own  experience  and  that  of  your  own 
immediate  circle  adequate,  and  you  will  find  that  your  ideal  has 
ipso  facto  become  unrealizable  under  the  given  conditions;  con¬ 
tent  yourself  with  a  statement  of  what  is  realizable,  and  you  will 
find  that,  as  an  account  of  an  ideal,  it  is  most  deplorably  low  and 
inadequate.  .  .  .  The  thesis  of  this  antinomy  may  be  briefly 
given  as  ‘my  ethical  end  must  at  least  be  capable  of  attainment,’ 
and  the  antithesis  as  ‘my  end,  just  because  it  is  an  ethical  end, 
must  be  incapable  of  attainment.’  ” 

There  is  no  escape  within  the  limits  of  morality  from  this  con¬ 
tradiction,  this  dead  center  between  idealism  and  fact.  An  ideal 
which  will  work  at  full  speed  and  full  power  from  a  dead  start 
never  has  been  known  and  never  can  be  known.  Even  those  ideals 
which  are  capable  of  direct  transmission  to  the  load  of  hard  fact 
have  to  be  applied  gradually.  The  most  characteristic  piece  of 
contemporary  mechanism,  the  motor  in  an  automobile,  is  im¬ 
practicable  if  it  is  abused.  Many  a  man  who  bowls  down  the 
avenue  to  the  day’s  work  in  his  twelve  cylinder  car  condemns  the 
Christian  religion  because  it  is  impracticable,  but  he  forgets  that 
he  subjects  religion  to  a  form  of  strain  which  would  wreck  his 
motor  car  if  he  were  fool  enough  to  try  it.  The  children  of  this 

90 


IS  CHRISTIANITY  PRACTICABLE? 


world  are  wiser  with  their  cars  than  with  their  ideals.  The  modern 
motor  is  meant  to  develop  sixty  horse  power  to  be  transmitted  to 
a  load  moving  at  a  high  rate  of  speed.  But  there  is  no  motor 
devised  which  can  start  the  car  from  a  dead  standstill  in  high 
gear.  To  crank  the  car  or  to  push  the  self-starter  with  the  clutch 
engaged  and  the  gear  in  “high”  is  little  short  of  mechanical  mur¬ 
der  in  the  first  degree.  The  batteries  are  rapidly  exhausted  and 
the  whole  engine  is  put  to  a  terrific  strain  which  it  was  never  in¬ 
tended  to  stand.  Ultimately  the  motor  “stalls.”  To  meet  this  situa¬ 
tion  the  engineer  has  devised  just  those  ingenious  contrivances, 
the  clutch  and  the  gears,  which  enable  the  driver  to  tune  up  the 
motor  apart  from  the  load  altogether,  and  then  to  apply  it  to 
the  load  by  a  gradual  application  of  power  which  never  strains  the 
engine  or  the  driving  parts  beyond  the  breaking  point. 

Now  it  is  at  least  common  sense  to  apply  the  teaching  of  this 
homely  modern  parable  of  power  to  the  problem  of  the  applica¬ 
tion  of  Christianity  to  the  dead  load  of  the  world’s  moral  inertia. 
His  biographer  says  of  Canon  Barnett  that  the  parish  machinery 
of  St.  Jude’s  in  Whitechapel  was  inspired  by  “the  spirit  of  a  man 
who  founded  temporary  helpfulness  on  deathless  principles.” 
Indeed,  Barnett  used  to  say  of  his  own  work,  “The  problem  which 
is  haunting  this  generation  is  how  to  open  channels  between  eter¬ 
nal  sources  and  every  day’s  need.”  The  practical  folk  and  the 
idealists  might,  at  least,  get  within  speaking  distance  of  one 
another  if  they  would  sit  down  around  an  automobile  or  over 
Canon  Barnett’s  life.  The  Canon  and  his  wife  once  attempted  the 
reformation  of  a  confirmed  drunkard,  and  they  set  before  him  as 
his  immediate  ideal  not  total  abstinence  from  the  first,  but  getting 
drunk  only  twice  a  week  for  a  while,  instead  of  every  day!  They 
threw  the  moral  gears  into  low  speed  until  they  had  their  subject 
in  motion. 

The  failure  of  the  practical  man  to  sense  the  delicate  structure 
of  all  idealism  rests  in  his  ethically  impossible  assumption  that 
the  nobler  an  ideal  is,  the  more  immediately  effective  it  ought  to 
be.  If  it  is  not  at  once  effective,  he  fails  to  understand  it  and  dis¬ 
cards  it  as  useless.  Whereas,  as  a  matter  of  moral  history,  the  more 
high  powered  an  idealism,  the  greater  the  number  of  gear  shifts 
necessary  to  transmit  its  full  power  to  the  dead  load  of  fact.  Only 
low-powered  cars  can  reduce  the  number  of  speeds  with  safety. 

9i 


THE  DISCIPLINES  OF  LIBERTY 


And  only  a  low-powered  morality  can  operate  full  speed  upon  the 
inert  world  the  moment  it  is  turned  over. 

The  life  of  Luther  furnishes  a  notable  example  of  the  wise  appli¬ 
cation  of  idealism  to  fact.  Martin  Luther  was  by  no  means  the 
pioneer  Reformer.  For  two  hundred  years  free  spirits  in  all  parts 
of  Europe  had  held  what  were  to  be  the  characteristic  Protestant 
views  of  the  Christian  life.  But  they  had  launched  these  views  in 
one  or  another  of  their  aspects  full  panoplied  from  their  own 
mature  discipline.  Luther  succeeded  historically  where  his  prede¬ 
cessors  had  failed  because  he  carried  the  German  people  with  him 
step  by  step  in  the  successive  stages  of  his  own  spiritual  history. 
He  did  not  wait  to  announce  the  full  findings  of  his  religious 
venture  before  sharing  them  with  others.  The  result  was,  that, 
taking  his  people  with  him  by  gradual  degrees,  he  brought  them 
to  the  point  where  they  finally  stood  with  him  for  the  full  Protes¬ 
tant  doctrine.  What  was  unique  in  Luther’s  history  was  not  the 
substance  of  his  final  position  as  a  Christian  thinker,  but  the 
gradual  method  by  which  he  carried  Germany  with  him  to  the 
historically  achieved  Reformation. 

Over  against  these  considerations  which  concern  the  trans¬ 
mission  of  an  immediately  impracticable  ideal  to  the  world  of 
practical  affairs  there  is  a  further  consideration  which  the  idealist 
would  do  well  to  ponder.  To  resume,  for  the  moment,  the  parable 
of  the  motor  car.  The  purchaser  of  a  car  receives  with  the  car  a 
little  book  of  instructions,  and  foremost  among  them  are  two  bits 
of  pertinent  advice.  “Do  not  idle  the  motor,  it  wastes  gas.  Do  not 
race  the  motor  when  the  gear  is  in  neutral.  More  motors  are 
ruined  by  racing  them  than  by  any  other  form  of  abuse.”  If  the 
practical  man  has  his  method  of  abusing  ideals  by  overstraining 
them  and  stalling  them,  the  idealist  has  a  kindred  moral  danger. 
There  is  a  type  of  idealism  which  comes  perilously  near  “idling 
the  motor,”  using  up  spiritual  energy  without  attempting  to  make 
any  definite  connection  with  the  actual  moral  load.  And  the  temp¬ 
tation  to  race  the  idling  motor  of  the  spiritual  life  is  always  very 
great. 

The  traditional  revival  meeting  has  fallen  into  moral  disrepute 
because  of  the  suspicion  that  it  is  merely  a  process  of  racing  the 
religious  motor.  A  tremendous  amount  of  energy  is  generated, 
but  it  is  not  applied  to  the  total  social  load  of  the  time.  The  line 

92 


IS  CHRISTIANITY  PRACTICABLE? 


between  real  emotion  and  sentimentalism  is  always  a  fine  line. 
But  the  fundamental  difference  between  them  lies  in  the  fact  that 
real  religious  emotion  is  always  in  direct  contact  with  the  load  of 
fact.  There  is  an  actual  transmission  of  energy  taking  place.  Emo¬ 
tion,  as  its  very  root  meaning  implies,  is  a  method  of  moving 
things.  But  sentimentalism,  which  outwardly  seems  to  be  very 
much  the  same  type  of  experience,  is  really  only  a  self-centered 
pleasure  in  seeing  and  feeling  the  “wheels  go  round.”  All  morally 
sensitive  and  right-minded  men  shrink  from  this  form  of  religious 
abuse. 

There  is  not  only  an  emotional  unchastity  in  the  revival  type 
of  religion.  There  is  an  unchastity  of  the  mind  in  certain  forms  of 
idealism,  which  are  far  more  interested  in  devising  Utopias  for 
the  sake  of  the  detached  mental  satisfaction  found  in  the  process 
than  in  actually  trying  to  transmit  any  form  of  mental  and  moral 
power  to  the  concrete  human  problem.  In  his  own  way  the  man 
whom  we  call  the  “intellectual”  is  as  futile  and  unlovely  a  char¬ 
acter  religiously  as  the  sentimentalist  whom  he  despises.  For  what 
distinguishes  the  so-called  “intellectual”  from  the  true  idealist  is 
just  this  persistent  habit  of  idling  the  moral  motor,  and  in  mo¬ 
ments  of  mental  activity  racing  it,  without  regard  to  fact. 

Each  type,  the  practical  man  and  the  visionary,  needs  the  other 
to  save  him  from  the  perils  of  his  own  isolated  point  of  view.  The 
problem  of  the  practicability  of  the  Christian  religion  is  not  the 
simple  and  direct  matter  which  each  too  often  seems  to  imply. 
Even  where  direct  connection  can  be  established  between  the 
gospel  ideal  and  the  present  fact  it  is  a  process  of  delicate  and 
gradual  adjustment.  The  forced  moral  option,  “All  or  Nothing,” 
must  always  establish  a  dead  center.  There  is  a  type  of  idealism 
which  will  accept  nothing  short  of  the  immediate  All,  and  therefore 
adds  nothing  to  the  present  fact.  And  there  is  a  practical  type  of 
mind  which  has  so  little  understanding  of  the  ideal  All  that  it 
fails  to  utilize  the  emanations  from  the  All  which  can  be  turned  to 
immediate  account.  This  type  likewise  gains  nothing.  Both  ideal¬ 
ism  and  common  sense  can  profit  by  the  parable  of  the  motor  and 
the  gears. 

We  need,  also,  to  avoid  this  moral  dead  center,  some  broad 
understanding  of  the  way  in  which  idealism  does  its  work  in  his¬ 
tory.  Gladstone  used  to  say  that  political  ideals  were  never 

93 


THE  DISCIPLINES  OF  LIBERTY 


realized.  But  that  does  not  mean  that  Gladstone  made  no  use  of 
political  ideals,  or  that  political  ideals  have  no  effect  on  political 
fact.  The  same  holds  true  of  Christian  idealism.  The  gospel  moral¬ 
ity  has  never  been  perfectly  realized  in  any  human  society.  But, 
nevertheless,  Christian  morality  has  affected  our  institutions 
widely  and  deeply.  The  abolition  of  the  institution  of  human 
slavery  may  be  credited  to  the  general  spread  of  Christian  moral¬ 
ity.  The  restriction  of  child  labor,  the  prevention  of  industrial 
accident  and  disease,  the  increasing  emancipation  of  woman,  are 
all  in  some  measure  the  consequences  of  a  diffuse  humane  spirit 
which  reflects  the  Christian  ethic.  These  moral  advances  cannot  be 
credited  directly  to  ecclesiastical  agitation.  More  often  than  other¬ 
wise  churchmen  have  been  social  obstructionists.  But  over  against 
ecclesiasticism  there  is  the  constant  subconscious  thrust  of  the 
Christian  spirit  constantly  working  its  own  changes  in  the  common 
point  of  view. 

We  talk  of  the  moral  struggle  as  though  it  were  a  process  of 
self-levitation,  a  lifting  of  life  by  its  ethical  boot-straps.  We  too 
often  and  too  easily  forget  that  Christianity  is  primarily  a  religion 
and  not  an  ethical  system.  In  so  doing  we  limit  the  energy  of  our 
religion  to  our  own  unaided  effort.  Robert  Browning  says  some¬ 
where,  in  rugged  lines,  “What  matter  though  I  doubt  in  every 
pore  ...  if  in  the  end  I  have  a  life  to  show,  the  thing  I  did, 
brought  out  in  evidence  against  the  thing  done  to  me  under¬ 
ground.”  We  have  to  struggle  in  this  world  against  the  things 
done  to  us  from  beneath.  But  that  does  not  mean  that  we  are  to 
miss  the  help  of  the  things  done  for  us  from  on  high.  When  Luther 
says  in  his  “Table  Talk”  that  we  have  a  free  will  for  the  little 
things  in  life,  building  our  houses,  milking  the  cows  and  the  like, 
but  that  in  the  great  issues  of  life  we  seem  to  be  in  the  hands  of 
higher  powers,  he  simply  speaks  out  of  common  experience. 
“Falling  in  love”  is  an  experience  of  this  strange  helplessness 
going  hand  in  hand  with  a  tremendous  access  of  energy  and  value. 
“Getting  religion”  is  the  same  sort  of  experience.  Chesterton  re¬ 
marks  that  the  value  of  any  idea  may  be  tested  by  our  ability  to 
use  it  as  an  oath.  The  great  realities  of  life  are  those  men  can 
swear  by.  “Herein  lies  the  weakness  of  ethical  culture,  for  its  oath 
is  ‘Oh,  my  goodness!’  ” 

Now  the  Christian  life,  even  in  the  moral  struggle,  is  not  a  busi- 

94 


IS  CHRISTIANITY  PRACTICABLE? 


ness  of  saying,  “Oh,  my  goodness.”  It  is  an  experience  of  the  Grace 
of  God.  What  that  grace  actually  means  in  the  moral  life  Saint 
Paul  has  told  us,  “But  we  all  with  unveiled  face  beholding  as  in  a 
mirror  the  glory  of  the  Lord,  are  transformed  into  the  same  image 
from  glory  to  glory,  even  as  from  the  Lord  the  Spirit.”  In  other 
words,  victory  in  the  moral  struggle  is  not  primarily  a  matter  of 
consciously  elevating  ourselves.  It  is  living  life  in  the  constant 
presence  of  the  ethical  ideal  and  suffering  that  ideal  to  work  its 
own  changes  in  us  and  for  us. 

Hawthorne’s  noble  legend,  “The  Great  Stone  Face,”  is  a  dis¬ 
criminating  study  of  the  moral  life,  of  the  process  whereby  men 
realize  ideals.  The  lad  of  the  legend  lived  in  the  presence  of  the 
nobly  perfect  image  so  long  and  so  devotedly  that  unconsciously 
he  was  changed  into  its  likeness.  The  processes  whereby  human 
society  approximates  more  and  more  to  the  ethic  of  Jesus  are  not 
otherwise.  We  live  in  the  presence  of  a  moral  ideal  which  seems, 
for  the  moment,  unattainable.  But  if  we  are  not  disobedient  to 
the  heavenly  vision  we  waken  some  morning  tot  find  that  all  the 
time  it  has  been  doing  its  work  in  and  through  us,  and  we  have 
been  drawing  nearer  to  it  all  the  while.  Religion  adds  to  the  strenu¬ 
ousness  of  the  moral  struggle  what  Wordsworth  calls  “a  wise  pas¬ 
sivity,”  which  does  not  mean  inertia  or  indifference,  but  rather  a 
correlative  faith  in  the  power  of  all  true  idealism  to  realize  itself 
in  us. 

The  task  of  the  Christian  minister,  therefore,  is  to  preach  the 
total  Christian  ideal  for  human  society  in  season  and  out  of 
season,  no  matter  how  remote  it  seems  and  how  impracticable  the 
hard-headed  world  may  judge  it  to  be.  He  will  do  this,  not  be¬ 
cause  he  expects  the  kingdom  immediately  to  appear,  but  because 
he  believes  that  there  is  an  energy  in  true  idealism,  independent  of 
all  human  wit  and  moral  ingenuity,  which  changes  us  uncon¬ 
sciously  into  its  own  likeness.  The  servant  of  the  gospel  ethic  will 
not  fail  or  be  discouraged  because  of  the  immediate  perplexity  and 
impracticability  which  attend  his  task.  “He  shall  see  of  the  travail 
of  his  soul  and  shall  be  satisfied.”  He  rests  his  moral  case  upon 
the  Grace  of  God,  which  is  no  theological  fiction,  but  the  con¬ 
summate  statement  of  the  working  of  all  idealism  in  history. 

There  is  a  very  beautiful  passage  in  “Modern  Painters”  at  the 
end  of  the  chapter  on  “The  Mountain  Glory”  in  which  Ruskin 

95 


THE  DISCIPLINES  OF  LIBERTY 


says  that  it  was  not  to  punish  Moses  that  God  gave  him  at  the 
last  his  vision  of  the  promised  land.  “Thou  shalt  see  the  land 
before  thee;  but  thou  shalt  not  go  thither,”  says  the  Deuterono- 
mist,  interpreting  this  experience  as  a  form  of  moral  retribution. 
Ruskin  candidly  throws  aside  the  Old  Testament  interpretation 
of  that  hour,  and  rewrites  the  whole  story  saying,  rather,  that  it 
must  have  been  to  solace  Moses  and  to  give  him  peace  at  his 
latter  end  that  God  took  him  up  into  that  high  place  where  his 
labors  ended  with  the  wide  prospect  of  his  land  of  heart’s  desire. 

We  too  often  accept  the  Old  Testament  interpretation  of  the 
universal  moral  experience  recorded  in  that  story.  Every  true 
Christian  has  his  prophetic  vision  of  the  promised  lands  of  inter¬ 
national  and  industrial  peace,  of  righteousness  and  love  in  the 
social  order.  But  he  feels,  too  often,  that  it  is  to  embitter  the  moral 
struggle  that  this  vision  is  given  him.  It  is  far  truer  to  human 
experience  at  its  deepest  and  best  to  say  that  life  gives  us  these 
visions  of  the  morally  perfect  world  to  solace  and  sustain  us. 
When  his  judge  read  Savonarola  out  of  the  Church  of  Rome  in 
the  public  square  in  Florence,  he  said,  “I  excommunicate  you  from 
the  Church  militant  and  triumphant.”  And  Savonarola  answered, 
“Militant  but  not  triumphant.”  Idealism  always  has  this  ultimate 
solace,  and  the  idealist  never  fails  to  avail  himself  of  it. 

The  one  sin  for  which  there  is  no  forgiveness  in  this  whole  realm 
of  Christian  concern  is  that  of  skepticism  as  to  the  ultimate  power 
of  the  Christian  ideal  to  work  its  own  final  victories  in  our  world. 
If  we  believe  that  truth  is  great  and  must  prevail,  we  know  that 
our  fighting  is  not  losing  because  of  the  “right  man  on  our  side.” 
To  lose  faith  in  the  ultimate  efficacy  of  the  spirit  of  Christ,  mani¬ 
fested  in  his  moral  teaching,  and  to  cease  upholding  the  prophetic 
vision  of  a  Christian  order  no  matter  if  “his  sad  face  on  the  cross 
sees  only  this  after  the  passion  of  a  thousand  years,”  is  to  sin  the 
sin  against  the  Holy  Spirit  for  which  there  is  not  and,  in  the  very 
nature  of  the  case,  cannot  be  any  forgiveness.  It  was  this  unfor¬ 
givable  sin  which  made  the  Prussian  morality  so  ominous  a  fact 
in  modern  history. 

The  German  mind,  logical  to  the  last,  but  without  imagination, 
spoke,  during  the  war,  with  dogmatic  assurance  of  hypocritical 
England  and  hypocritical  America,  each  professing  a  nominal 
national  Christianity,  but  both  actually  manifesting  many  un- 

96 


IS  CHRISTIANITY  PRACTICABLE? 


Christian  aspects  of  national  life.  The  charge  of  hypocrisy  is  the 
commonest  and  at  the  same  time  the  most  cruel  charge  which  can 
be  made  against  an  individual  or  a  state.  If  hypocrisy  be  the  mere 
contrast  between  the  cherished  ideal  and  the  achieved  moral  fact, 
we  are  nothing  but  a  race  of  hypocrites.  For  there  is  no  man  who 
does  not  feel  the  gulf  between  what  he  is  and  what  he  aspires  to 
be.  But  the  essence  of  hypocrisy  is  not  to  be  found  in  the  mere 
distance  which  separates  the  idealist  from  the  object  of  his  moral 
effort.  Hypocrisy  lies  in  giving  mere  lip  service  to  ideals  which 
one  has  no  deep  desire  to  realize  in  life.  Hypocrisy  is  not  a  matter 
of  immediate  ethical  status,  but  of  moral  intention. 

The  Prussian  solution  of  the  dilemma  created  by  the  moral 
contrast  between  what  Christendom  aspires  to  be  and  what  it 
now  is,  is  very  simple.  The  only  difficulty  with  it  is  that  it  is  too 
simple.  It  cuts  the  Gordian  knot  which  it  has  not  the  patience  or 
the  wit  to  untie.  Friedrich  Naumann  published  in  1910  a  very 
significant  series  of  “ Brief e  iiber  Religion  ”  In  these  Letters  he 
says: 

“We  live  in  an  age  of  Capitalism,  and  we  possess  a  religion 
which  was  born  before  this  age.  ...  We  live  in  the  midst  of 
Mammonism,  however  little  we  may  individually  be  the  servants 
of  Mammon.  Our  age  has  become  financial  and  speculative.  And 
in  this  age  we  possess  a  Saviour  who  says,  with  inconsiderate  de¬ 
cision,  We  cannot  serve  God  and  Mammon/  How  can  we  escape 
the  pricks  of  our  own  conscience?  .  .  .  This  our  capitalistic  world, 
in  which  we  live,  because  none  other  exists  for  us,  is  organized 
according  to  the  principle,  ‘Thou  shalt  covet  thy  neighbour’s 
house.’  Thou  shalt  will  to  gain  the  market  which  the  English  hold, 
thou  shalt  get  the  influence  in  Constantinople  which  the  French 
possess,  thou  shalt  eat  the  bread  which,  in  strictness,  the  Russian 
peasant  himself  should  eat.  And  so  on  endlessly.  ‘Thou  shalt 
covet.’  ...  All  the  moods  of  the  Gospel  only  hover,  like  distant, 
white  clouds  of  longing,  above  the  actual  doings  of  our  time.  .  .  . 

This  gospel  of  the  poor  is  one  of  the  standards  of  our  life,  but 
it  is  not  the  only  standard.  Not  our  entire  morality  is  rooted  in 
the  Gospel,  but  only  part  of  it.  .  .  .  Beside  the  Gospel  there  are 
demands  of  power  and  right,  without  which  human  society  cannot 
exist.  I  myself,  at  least,  do  not  know  how  to  help  myself  in  the 

97 


THE  DISCIPLINES  OF  LIBERTY 


conflict  between  Christianity  and  the  other  tasks  of  life,  save  by 
the  attempt  to  recognize  the  limits  of  Christianity.  A  Christian 
who  follows  exclusively  his  Christian  theory  is  impossible  in  this 
our  world.  .  .  . 

Everywhere  Christianity  is  part  of  life,  nowhere  life  itself  in 
its  entirety.  In  a  word,  I  know  that  all  of  us,  if  we  are  to  live  at 
all,  are  forced  to  accept  and  to  use,  as  the  foundations  of  our 
existence,  the  conditions  required  by  nature  in  the  struggle  for 
existence;  and  that  only  upon  this  foundation  do  we  possess  the 
capacity  for  realizing  the  higher  morality  of  the  Gospel,  in  so  far 
as  this  realization  is  possible  upon  such  a  foundation.  .  .  .  Now 
this  means  for  our  practical  life  that  we  construct  our  house  of 
the  State,  not  with  cedars  of  Lebanon,  but  with  the  building 
stones  from  the  Roman  Capitol.  Hence  we  do  not  consult  Jesus, 
when  we  are  concerned  with  things  which  belong  to  the  domain 
of  the  construction  of  the  State  and  of  Political  Economy.  This 
sounds  hard  and  abrupt  for  every  human  being  brought  up  a 
Christian,  but  appears  to  be  sound  Lutheranism.” 

It  may  be  sound  Lutheranism,  for  Lutheranism  always  has  been 
too  much  an  attempted  religious  sanction  of  Prussianism.  But  it 
is  not  sound  Christianity.  There  can  be  no  possible  quarrel  with 
NaumamTs  statement  of  fact.  Most  of  our  modern  states  are 
built  with  stones  from  Rome.  The  common  law  of  Christendom 
does  look  to  the  Capitol  rather  than  to  the  Mount  of  the  Beati¬ 
tudes.  But  the  normal  Christian  conscience  dissents  from  Nau- 
mann’s  conclusion  that  this  situation  is  morally  admirable  and 
should  persist  indefinitely.  If  the  corporate  Christian  conscience 
of  our  time  is  denied  at  least  the  hope  of  a  social  order  which 
looks  to  the  Sermon  on  the  Mount  for  its  sanctions,  and  patient, 
painful  effort  toward  that  order,  then  for  most  of  us  the  deeper, 
longer  meaning  of  our  Christian  life  has  been  taken  away.  Prus¬ 
sia,  in  the  person  of  Naumann  and  his  kind,  rid  itself  of  the  charge 
of  hypocrisy,  passed  so  glibly  upon  the  rest  of  Christendom,  by 
the  cheap  and  easy  method  of  “recognizing  the  limits  of  Chris¬ 
tianity,”  in  other  words  of  reverting  to  an  essentially  monastic 
conception  of  the  religious  life.  If  it  be  true  that  “recognizing 
the  limits  of  Christianity”  is  sound  Lutheranism,  then  Luther  re¬ 
mained  as  truly  a  monk  after  the  Reformation  as  he  was  before. 

98 


IS  CHRISTIANITY  PRACTICABLE? 


For  monasticism  is  not  a  matter  of  hair  shirts  and  cowls  and 
bare  celibate  cells.  These  are,  at  the  most,  its  outward  and  visible 
symbols.  Monasticism  always  is  what  it  was  at  first,  not  so  much 
a  Christian  contempt  for  the  world  as  a  Christian  despair  of  the 
world,  a  process  of  “recognizing  the  limits  of  Christianity,”  that 
is,  of  confining  it  to  the  narrow  realm  of  private  virtue  and  of 
abandoning  the  social  whole  to  Satan. 

In  so  far  as  there  was  any  Christian  piety  in  modern  Prussia,  it 
was  essentially  a  monastic  Christianity.  It  eased  its  conscience 
of  the  suspicion  of  hypocrisy  by  its  frank  definition  of  the  re¬ 
stricted  limits  of  the  gospel  ethic.  It  left  itself  free  to  operate  in 
industry  and  statescraft  and  war  on  the  basis  of  moral  principles 
which  had  nothing  to  do  with  the  ethic  of  Jesus.  On  such  a  basis 
there  can  be  no  hope  for  any  profoundly  Christian  world.  Once  a 
reservation  is  made  as  to  the  absoluteness  of  the  moral  claim  of 
Jesus  over  man’s  total  life,  the  Christian  case  is  as  good  as  lost. 
Christianity  may  linger  as  an  assurance  to  the  dying,  a  solace  to 
the  bereaved,  and  the  like.  But  its  work  in  history  is  over. 

Better  far  the  “hypocrisy”  of  England  and  America,  that  is,  a 
dumb,  dogged  hope  that  somehow  we  may  get  a  world,  in  God’s 
good  time,  more  wholly  Christlike,  than  the  candid  renunciation  of 
this  hope.  The  Prussian  may  have  eased  his  conscience  by  his 
logic.  But  he  forfeited  at  the  same  time  any  claim  to  a  Christian 
mission  in  human  history.  And  by  his  monasticism  he  not  only 
left  the  world  to  Satan,  he  found  himself  forced  to  play  the  leading 
role  as  the  advocatus  diaboli. 

There  are  men  in  our  America,  who,  without  realizing  it,  hold 
the  Prussian  conception  of  the  relation  of  the  ethic  of  Jesus  to 
the  structure  of  society.  They  value  the  sentimental  and  solacing 
aspects  of  the  gospel  as  it  touches  their  own  mood  and  need.  But 
they  will  tell  you  candidly,  even  churchmen  among  them,  that 
they  do  not  think  our  world  as  a  whole  could  be  run  on  a  Chris¬ 
tian  basis,  that  they  make  no  pretence  to  do  so  themselves  and  no 
effort  to  help  realize  such  a  world.  These  men  are  the  loudest  in 
their  denunciation  of  monks  and  monkery.  They  rebel,  from  the 
depths  of  their  well-fed,  healthy  and  aggressive  natures  against 
all  for  which  they  think  monasticism  stands.  But  in  so  far  as  they 
are  Christians,  and  many  of  them  think  they  are  in  their  private 
life,  they  belong  to  the  desert  and  their  ethic  is  clothed  in  the 

99 


THE  DISCIPLINES  OF  LIBERTY 

hair  shirt.  For  they  definitely  commit  the  wider  world  of  things 
where  they  buy  and  sell,  fight  and  rule,  to  the  overlordship  of 
Satan,  Satan  being  a  synonym  for  the  pitiless  brutality  of  the 
struggle  for  existence.  Every  accommodation  train  starting  for  the 
city  on  a  Monday  morning  with  its  load  of  commuters  carries  its 
toll  of  monks,  of  respectable  men  who  having  been  to  church  on 
Sunday  and  having  concluded  the  Lord’s  Day  by  candidly  “recog¬ 
nizing  the  limits  of  Christianity,”  set  off  to  town  the  next  morning 
to  do  business  in  a  world  which  in  advance  they  have  deliberately 
handed  over  to  the  powers  of  darkness.  The  essence  of  modern 
monasticism  is  to  be  found,  not  in  the  Catholic  convent  or  the 
High  Anglican  monastery.  It  is  to  be  found  in  any  respectable 
suburb  where  Christianity  is  identified  with  home,  carpet  slippers 
and  the  “outside-business-hours”  point  of  view,  all  of  which  are 
left  behind  when  the  commuter  pulls  out  of  his  innocuous  sub¬ 
urban  community  on  the  eight  o’clock  train  for  town. 

Spiritually  such  a  man  is  taking  to  the  desert  when  he  goes  to 
the  city.  If  he  knew  himself  he  would  have  the  moral  courage 
to  go  to  business  in  a  cowl  and  a  rope  girdle  to  make  it  perfectly 
plain  that  his  Christianity  has  no  social  interest  and  no  social 
purpose  and  hope.  He  may  draw  a  certain  private  satisfaction  and 
solace  out  of  his  “restricted  Christianity.”  But  his  Christian 
mission  in  history  is  over  and  done.  He  might  as  well  live  on  a 
pillar  in  the  middle  of  the  Sahara  desert  so  far  as  the  City  of 
God  on  earth  is  concerned.  He  will  never  lift  the  stone  or  cleave 
the  wood  to  find  and  fashion  it.  Such  is  the  Prussian  sin  against 
the  Holy  Ghost  when  translated  into  the  terms  of  normal  American 
life. 


ioo 


CHAPTER  VI. 


The  Counsels  of  Perfection. 

IN  the  fifth  chapter  of  Genesis  is  to  be  found  “the  book  of  the 
generations  of  Adams,”  which  is  little  more  than  a  series  of 
“vital  statistics”  from  Eden  to  the  Flood.  We  read  that 
“Adam  lived  an  hundred  and  thirty  two  years  and  begat  a  son 
and  called  his  name  Seth;  and  all  the  days  that  Adam  lived  were 
nine  hundred  and  thirty  years.  And  Seth  lived  an  hundred  and  five 
years  and  begat  Enos;  and  all  the  days  of  Seth  were  nine  hundred 
and  twelve  years.  And  Enos  lived  ninety  years  and  begat  Cainan ; 
and  all  the  days  of  Enos  were  nine  hundred  and  five  years.”  .  .  . 
“and  all  the  days  of  Methuselah  were  nine  hundred  and  sixty  and 
nine  years.” 

What  an  extraordinarily  barren  record  it  is.  In  the  thirty-two 
verses  of  the  chapter  we  cover  eight  thousand  one  hundred  and 
twenty-four  years  of  human  experience,  and  nothing  to  show  for 
it  save  these  records  of  preposterous  longevity.  “All  the  days  of 
Mahalaleel  were  eight  hundred  and  ninety  and  five  years.”  Did 
Mahalaleel  ever  get  tired  of  life?  Is  such  a  life  indefinitely  ex¬ 
tended  in  time  what  we  mean  by  immortality? 

Jesus  of  Nazareth  lived  thirty- three  years  at  the  most,  probably 
not  more  than  thirty  years.  His  active  ministry  was  crowded  into 
a  few  months.  But  of  that  life  his  greatest  biographer  said,  “And 
there  are  also  many  other  things  which  Jesus  did,  the  which  if 
they  should  be  written  every  one,  I  suppose  that  even  the  world 
itself  could  not  contain  the  books  that  should  be  written.” 

When  Jesus  died  on  the  cross,  he  cried,  “It  is  finished.”  It  must 
always  seem  one  of  the  contradictions  of  history  that  Jesus  could 
speak  of  his  life  as  a  finished  life.  It  had  to  come  to  its  historical 
end,  but  judged  by  the  standards  commonly  used  in  passing  on 
men’s  work  in  history  his  life  was  pathetically  incomplete. 

Consider  for  a  moment  the  facts.  Jesus  was  a  young  man.  His 
death  presents  the  most  difficult  type  of  human  problem  which 

ioi 


THE  DISCIPLINES  OF  LIBERTY 


we  have  to  face — the  interruption  and  cessation,  just  at  its  be¬ 
ginning,  of  a  work  full  of  great  promise.  The  synoptic  gospels 
seem  to  suggest  that  the  ministry  of  Jesus  lasted  only  a  single 
year,  for  they  know  only  one  Passover,  that  of  Passion  Week.  The 
fourth  gospel  records  three  Passovers  and  thus  allows  but  three 
years  at  the  outside  for  Jesus’  ministry.  It  is  probable  that  the 
synoptic  chronology  is  to  be  preferred.  The  crucifixion  must  raise 
in  the  sensitive  mind,  apart  from  its  theological  values,  the  natural 
rebellion  which  Tennyson  felt  at  the  death  of  Arthur  Hallam, 
which  any  of  us  feel  when  a  young  doctor  or  minister  or  teacher 
dies  just  as  he  is  finding  his  feet  in  his  life  work.  We  try  to  dull 
the  edge  of  our  sorrow  and  perplexity  by  the  conventional  plati¬ 
tudes,  but  they  do  not  help  much.  We  feel  dumbly  and  deeply  that 
youth  deserves  better  of  life  than  that,  and  that  dying  at  such  a 
time  youth  leaves  life  its  heavy  debtor.  The  last  few  years  have 
given  a  fresh  poignancy  to  this  problem. 

Jesus  left  his  teaching  unfinished.  The  longer  one  ponders  over 
the  New  Testament  the  clearer  it  is  that  Jesus  was  not  a  system 
maker,  nor  an  ethics  professor.  He  stands  nearer  to  the  prophets 
than  he  stands  to  the  professors,  and  even  nearer  the  poets  than 
the  prophets  in  that  there  is  about  his  teaching  a  certain  splendid 
casualness,  a  great  indifference  to  logical  consistency  and  com¬ 
pleteness.  The  “argument  from  silence”  in  the  gospels  sometimes 
seems  their  greatest  argument.  The  truth  that  Jesus  left  unsaid, 
which  with  more  time  he  might  have  said,  bulks  very  large  in  the 
modern  mind.  For  all  their  beauty  and  perfection  the  gospels  seem 
very  unfinished  in  volume  beside  Plato’s  Dialogues  or  the  tomes 
of  Saint  Augustine. 

Jesus  left  his  work  unfinished.  If  any  modern  parish  minister 
were  to  come  to  the  end  of  his  life  and  leave  his  ministry  at  the 
torn  and  ragged  ends  which  mark  the  spot  where  the  cross 
wrenched  Jesus  away  from  his  work,  the  world  would  instantly 
write  such  a  man’s  ministry  down  as  an  utter  failure.  The  last 
thing  the  world  would  say  of  such  a  task  would  be,  “It  is  fin¬ 
ished.”  Jesus  began  his  preaching  ministry  with  a  following  of 
many  thousands.  Before  a  year  was  half  over  he  had  alienated  the 
thousands  and  reduced  his  disciples  to  the  tens.  Of  the  handful 
of  followers  who  were  with  him  from  Caesarea  Philippi  onward 
one  finally  betrayed  him,  another  denied  him,  and  save  for  a 


102 


THE  COUNSELS  OF  PERFECTION 


beloved  disciple  and  a  few  women  at  the  foot  of  the  cross,  the 
rest  forsook  him  and  fled.  Even  John  Brown  of  Ossawatomie  kept 
his  ragged  band  of  revolutionaries  with  him  to  the  last.  It  is  very 
hard,  using  any  of  our  working  standards  of  judgment,  to  see  how 
such  a  life  could  be  called  finished. 

The  more  we  reflect  on  this  seeming  contradiction  in  terms  the 
clearer  it  is  that  the  world’s  habitual  quantitative  standards  of 
value  are  simply  ignored  in  the  gospels.  There  is  not  a  single 
quantitative  test  of  excellence  by  which  Jesus’  life  could  be  called 
anything  but  a  tragic  failure.  Judged  by  the  Genesis  conception 
of  life,  Jesus  died  a  mere  child  in  the  arms  of  history.  Judged  by 
the  Psalmist’s  statement  that  the  days  of  our  years  are  three  score 
years  and  ten,  and  by  reason  of  strength  four  score  years,  Jesus 
lived  less  than  half  a  life.  If  the  gift  of  Proverbial  wisdom  is 
length  of  days,  Jesus  must  have  failed  to  get  understanding.  Nor 
are  the  Church  Year  Book  methods  of  appraising  Christian 
achievement  of  any  imaginable  use  when  brought  to  the  gospels. 
“Number  of  communicants,  value  of  church  property,  home  ex¬ 
penses,  benevolences;”  there  is  absolutely  no  hope  of  measuring 
the  value  of  the  life  of  Jesus  in  these  terms. 

In  the  prayer  of  Christ  recorded  in  the  seventeenth  chapter  of 
John  this  word  “finished”  occurs  again.  “I  have  glorified  thee  on 
the  earth;  I  have  finished  the  work  which  thou  gavest  me  to  do. 
...  I  have  manifested  thy  name  unto  the  men  whom  thou  gavest 
me  out  of  the  world.”  Obviously  the  finished  nature  of  the  life  of 
Jesus  was  a  matter  of  life’s  quality,  not  of  its  quantities.  The 
Temptation  of  Jesus  seems  to  have  been  a  struggle  with  what  one 
of  the  moderns  has  called  “the  sin  of  the  quantitative  standard.” 
Jesus  must  have  come  out  of  the  wilderness  with  the  whole  quan¬ 
titative  conception  of  human  worth  put  behind  him  once  and  for 
all,  committed  only  to  life’s  divine  quality.  It  could  not  have 
mattered  to  him,  after  that,  whether  he  lived  one  year  more  or 
fifty  more,  whether  he  had  five  thousand  disciples  or  only  a  frac¬ 
tion  of  his  chosen  twelve,  so  far  as  his  own  inner  compensations 
for  living  were  concerned.  His  task  was  to  “manifest  the  name  of 
God,”  to  reveal  the  qualitative  perfection  of  his  Father’s 
righteousness. 

But  we  live  in  an  age  of  the  quantitative  standard.  Much  of  our 
difficulty  in  understanding  Christianity  rests  on  this  fact.  It  is 

103 


THE  DISCIPLINES  OF  LIBERTY 


said  of  the  late  Mr.  Pierpont  Morgan  that  one  of  his  desires 
toward  the  end  of  his  life  was  to  carry  the  electrification  of  the 
New  York,  New  Haven  and  Hartford  railroad  so  far  by  the  time 
of  his  death,  that  the  funeral  train  which  would  carry  his  body 
from  New  York  to  Hartford  for  burial  should  be  drawn  as  far  as 
New  Haven  by  an  electric  locomotive.  As  a  matter  of  fact  when 
that  day  came  the  electrification  of  the  road  had  reached  only  to 
Bridgeport,  and  the  engines  had  to  be  changed  there.  On  that 
basis  Mr.  Morgan  would  have  said  of  himself  that  he  had  lived 
an  unfinished  life.  For  all  his  millions  and  his  financial  achieve¬ 
ments  there  was  a  pathetic  irony  in  those  dozen  odd  unfinished 
miles  between  Bridgeport  and  New  Haven. 

But  modern  life  is  like  that.  The  world  is  in  conspiracy  against 
the  man  who  sets  up  for  himself  a  quantitative  test  of  a  finished 
work.  The  tasks  at  which  we  labor  to-day  are  so  wide-reaching  and 
so  far-reaching,  that  it  is  given  to  few  men,  or  none,  to  isolate 
their  own  labor  and  to  see  it  begun,  continued  and  ended  as  a 
quantitatively  achieved  fact.  This  is  supremely  true  of  religion’s 
work  in  history.  For  the  religious  task  is  as  wide  as  all  human  so¬ 
ciety  and  as  long  as  human  history,  and  the  most  that  any  man 
can  do  in  his  own  generation  is  to  lay  well  his  tier  of  stone  on 
the  slowly  rising  walls  of  the  City  of  God. 

The  last  verse  of  the  fifth  chapter  of  Matthew  has  given  untold 
perplexity  and  discouragement  to  Christians.  “Be  ye  therefore 
perfect  even  as  your  Father  which  is  in  heaven  is  perfect.”  So  pre¬ 
posterous  and  impossible  do  these  words  seem  that  Christianity 
has  always  tended  to  seek  some  mitigation  of  this  incredible  ideal¬ 
ism.  The  Roman  Church  would  make  the  counsels  of  perfection 
obligatory  only  upon  those  who  definitely  enter  a  “religious” 
vocation.  It  then  underwrites  these  counsels  of  perfection  with  less 
exacting  requirements  for  the  laity  at  large.  The  early  churches 
of  New  England  facing  the  same  difficulty  all  but  undermined  the 
spiritual  integrity  of  their  Christian  idealism  by  establishing  a 
“Half  Way  Covenant”  which  met  the  requirements  of  respectable 
citizenship  in  the  State  but  asked  for  no  margins  of  excellence  in 
the  realm  of  the  spirit. 

Phillips  Brooks  used  to  tell  candidates  for  the  ministry  that  no 
preacher  ought  to  set  before  his  people  ideals  which  he  did  not 
intend  and  expect  them  to  realize.  It  would  seem,  on  this  basis, 

104 


THE  COUNSELS  OF  PERFECTION 


that  Jesus  erred  seriously  as  a  preacher  in  setting  before  us  an 
absolutely  impossible  perfection  as  the  goal  of  our  effort.  For  as 
the  ethics  don  says: 

“The  theory  of  an  ‘infinitely  distant’  ideal,  if  you  take  it 
seriously,  so  far  from  elevating  and  purifying  morality,  makes  all 
moral  action  unmeaning  and  worthless.  And  the  mischievous 
effects  of  devotion  to  so  perverse  an  ethical  doctrine  are  not  mere 
matters  of  theory:  history,  especially  the  history  of  the  religious 
life  of  individuals  and  nations,  is  only  too  eloquent  as  to  the  stag¬ 
nation  of  intellect,  the  indifference  to  pressing  and  practical 
human  needs,  the  carelessness  of  real  human  happiness  and  misery, 
to  which  this  unreasoning  adoption  of  ideals  out  of  all  relation  to 
actual  human  life  under  definite  terrestrial  surroundings  has 
invariably  led.”* 

The  whole  difficulty  with  the  supposed  moral  problem  of  the 
“counsels  of  perfection”  lies  in  the  crude  rule-of-thumb  of  the 
quantitative  standard  by  which  we  ordinarily  measure  perfection. 
For  as  a  matter  of  simple,  literal  fact  Jesus  did  not  say  we  were 
to  be  as  perfect  as  our  Father.  It  is  only  careless  reading  of  the 
text,  having  its  origins  in  the  fixed  idea  of  quantitative  excellence, 
which  so  blinds  our  eyes  that  we  cannot  even  see  the  plain  words 
on  the  page  of  the  gospel.  What  Jesus  actually  said  was,  “Be  ye 
therefore  perfect ,  ...  as  your  Father  in  heaven  is  perfect,”  a 
very  different  matter.  There  is  no  question  of  quantitative  ex¬ 
cellence  here,  only  of  the  quality  of  our  goodness.  We  are  not 
asked  to  be  as  good  as  God  is.  But  we  are  commanded  to  be 
good,  as  God  is  good,  in  the  way  that  He  is  good.  How  is  God 
good?  The  Sermon  on  the  Mount  is  Jesus’  simplest  answer  to 
that  question.  The  divine  goodness  differs  from  the  goodness  of 
the  philistine  world  not  in  its  degree  but  in  its  kind.  The  philistine 
world  loves  its  neighbors  and  hates  its  enemies.  But  the  Eternal 
Goodness  loves  its  enemies,  blesses  those  that  curse  it,  does  good 
to  those  that  hate  it,  and  prays  for  those  that  persecute  it.  It 
makes  its  sun  rise  on  the  evil  and  on  the  good  and  sends  its  rain 
on  the  just  and  on  the  unjust.  God  differs  from  us,  morally,  not 
because  he  knows  more  neighbors  to  love  than  we  know,  not 
because  he  has  more  enemies  to  hate  than  we  have.  His  perfection 
is  not  a  matter  of  degree  at  all.  It  is  a  matter  of  disposition,  of 

*  “The  Problem  of  Conduct,”  A.  E.  Taylor,  pp.  395,  396. 

105 


THE  DISCIPLINES  OF  LIBERTY 


quality.  The  Divine  Goodness  needs  but  one  enemy  to  occasion 
its  perfection,  one  persecutor  to  show  its  unlikeness  to  our  im¬ 
perfect  goodness.  Loving  a  thousand  enemies  would  not  make  it 
any  more  perfect  than  loving  one.  Praying  for  a  thousand  perse¬ 
cutors  would  not  enhance  the  qualitative  perfection  revealed  in 
the  prayer  for  one  persecutor. 

In  short,  the  Sermon  on  the  Mount,  with  its  central  counsel  of 
Christian  perfection,  is  moral  nonsense  when  measured  by  the 
quantitative  test.  It  yields  its  meanings  and  opens  its  possibilities 
only  to  the  man  who  approaches  it  from  this  other  and  opposite 
angle.  Jesus  means  us  to  be  perfect  as  our  Father  is  perfect.  There 
is  a  kind  of  ethical  soberness  about  the  teaching  of  Jesus  which 
delivers  it  entirely  from  the  charge  of  being  an  “infinitely  distant” 
ideal.  The  qualitative  perfection  of  the  Eternal  Goodness  is  always 
open  to  any  man  who  chooses  to  claim  and  exercise  it  in  any  given 
human  situation. 

We  have  spoken  of  those  detached  examples  of  the  Christian 
life  which  are  to  be  found  scattered  all  through  history  and  litera¬ 
ture.  What  more  could  be  added  to  them  to  enhance  their  per¬ 
fection?  Edith  Cavell,  in  the  last  moment  when  she  tried  to  sum 
up  the  whole  temper  of  her  living  in  those  daring  and  revolution¬ 
ary  words,  “I  see  that  patriotism  is  not  enough.  I  must  die 
without  hatred  or  bitterness  toward  any  one,”  was  perfect  as  God 
is  perfect.  No  words  which  she  could  have  added  to  what  she  said 
in  that  moment,  no  longer  years  in  which  to  live  out  her  faith, 
would  have  made  her  character  more  perfect  than  it  was  in  that 
moment.  Qualitatively  her  goodness  was  one  with  the  goodness 
of  God,  and  beyond  that  moral  unity  later  life  could  not  have 
carried  her.  Even  eternity  has  nothing  which  it  can  add  to  that 
perfection. 

Tolstoi  filled  hundreds  upon  hundreds  of  pages  with  his  synop¬ 
sis  and  exposition  of  the  four  gospels.  He  added  other  volumes 
of  independent  comment  upon  Christianity.  Altogether  his  work 
as  a  lay  theologian  was  not  inconsiderable.  But  Tolstoi’s  most 
perfect  statement  of  the  Christian  religion  is  to  be  found  in  his 
matchless  little  story,  “Where  Love  is,  there  God  is  also.”  This 
brief  parable  takes  only  a  half  dozen  pages,  but  qualitatively  it 
is  perfect.  No  quantitative  development  of  it  could  conceivably 
add  to  its  perfection. 

106 


THE  COUNSELS  OF  PERFECTION 


The  Puritan  conscience  unhappily  severed  the  moral  judgment 
from  the  aesthetic  judgment.  The  two  are  to  be  distinguished  but 
they  ought  not  to  be  dissociated.  And  if  there  be  in  religion  a  real 
beauty  of  holiness  then  the  aesthetic  judgment  has  its  place  in  the 
moral  life.  For  the  first  axiom  of  aesthetics  is  something  like  this, 
Beauty  is  a  qualitative  not  a  quantitative  excellence. 

The  normal  philistine  mind  of  our  time  usually  has  to  undergo 
some  process  of  conversion  before  it  gets  this  point  of  view. 
Niagara  Falls  is  universally  disappointing  to  the  man  who  visits 
it  for  the  first  time.  He  expects  something  “bigger.”  Nothing 
short  of  a  transvaluation  of  values  can  ever  reveal  to  him  the 
total  beauty  of  the  scene;  the  direct  precision  of  the  American 
Falls,  the  “rest”  and  musical  pause  of  Goat  Island,  and  then  the 
great  curve  of  the  Horseshoe  Falls.  There  are  other  falls  where 
more  water  drops  a  greater  distance,  but  for  perfect  design  they 
do  not  match  Niagara. 

The  visitor  to  the  world’s  great  art  galleries  goes  around  in 
advance  with  his  Baedeker  and  penny  prints.  He  knows  what  to 
look  for.  He  has  his  double  stars  already  listed.  What  troubles 
him,  at  first,  is  the  fact  that  so  many  of  the  masterpieces  are  rela¬ 
tively  so  diminutive.  He  feels  that  a  great  picture  deserves  a  great 
canvas.  Only  a  reversal  of  his  standards  of  judgment  will  ever 
persuade  him  that  “Washington  Crossing  the  Delaware,”  which 
takes  a  whole  side  wall,  is  not  so  “great”  a  picture  as  Gilbert 
Stuart’s  “Washington,”  which  needs  only  a  half  dozen  square  feet. 
In  short,  beauty  simply  cannot  be  appraised  with  a  yardstick. 

Now  part  of  the  “foolishness  of  the  gospel”  rests  in  just  this 
indifference  to  the  quantitative  test.  “Not  many  mighty,  not  many 
noble,  are  called.”  The  ministry  of  Jesus  sometimes  perplexes  us 
moderns  by  its  parochial  character.  Jesus  was  content  to  live 
among  his  own  people.  So  far  as  we  know,  Caesarea  Philippi  to 
the  north  and  Bethlehem  to  the  south,  a  bare  hundred  miles, 
marked  the  geographical  limits  of  Jesus’  work.  He  undoubtedly 
contemplated  our  total  humanity  from  the  North  and  from  the 
South,  from  the  East  and  from  the  West,  as  part  of  his  Kingdom- 
to-be,  but  he  never  traveled  afield  as  a  propagandist.  He  confined 
himself  with  a  kind  of  deliberate  provincialism  to  the  lost  sheep 
of  the  house  of  Israel. 


107 


THE  DISCIPLINES  OF  LIBERTY 


This  inaction  and  indifference  admits  of  no  explanation  save 
on  the  theory  that  Jesus  was  seeking  not  to  extend  men’s  quanti¬ 
tative  conception  of  the  Kingdom,  but  to  establish  for  it  a  new 
qualitative  standard.  For  this  purpose  miles  were  irrelevant.  He 
needed  only  a  child  standing  hard  by,  or  a  single  visitor  by  night, 
or  the  woman  come  to  draw  water  at  the  well  where  he  was  sitting. 
Qualitative  religion  is  not  a  matter  of  statistics.  The  ministry  of 
Jesus  is  a  very  poor  and  meager  thing  when  compared  with  globe¬ 
trotting  ecclesiasticism  and  its  tuft-hunting  among  the  mighty 
of  this  world. 

The  modern  mind  is  troubled  how  to  vindicate  the  central 
Christian  affirmation  that  God  cares  for  the  individual.  Its  cen¬ 
tral  reason  for  clinging  to  this  faith  rests  upon  Jesus’  concern  for 
and  concentration  upon  the  single  individual.  God,  we  say,  cannot 
be  less  than  Jesus  in  this  respect.  But  Jesus’  concern  for  the  indi¬ 
vidual  had  about  it  a  moral  artistry  which  is  very  hard  for  us  to 
understand,  because  we  bring  to  our  judgments  the  businesslike 
test  of  quantities,  rather  than  the  artist’s  subtler  and  truer  test 
of  quality.  The  workaday  mind  is  ready  to  charge  off  the  single 
sparrow  fallen  to  the  ground  to  biological  profit  and  loss.  It  takes 
the  artist  to  see  the  beauty,  the  pathos  and  the  value  of  the  lone 
little  bird. 

When  we  wish  to  seek  help  from  the  mind  of  our  own  time  to 
grasp  the  moral  paradox  of  the  sparrow  and  the  flower  of  the  field, 
we  must  turn  not  to  the  statisticians  but  to  the  poets  and  the 
painters.  Bums  with  his  love  of  the  wee  beasties  of  the  field 
understood  Jesus.  Wordsworth  with  his  susceptibility  to  the  mean¬ 
est  flower  that  grows,  his  single  eye  for  the  small  celandine  or 
the  primrose  by  the  river’s  brim,  writes  in  the  gospel  mood.  In  his 
“Oxford  Studies  in  Poetry,”  Mr.  Bradley  calls  attention  to  the 
frequent  and  almost  wearisome  reiteration  of  the  adjective  “soli¬ 
tary”  in  Wordsworth’s  poetry.  There  is  hardly  a  page  of  either 
“The  Prelude”  or  “The  Excursion”  where  this  word  is  not  found, 
and  sometimes  often  found.  “The  solitary  tree,”  “the  solitary 
sheep,”  “the  solitary  tarn,”  “The  Solitary”  himself,  incarnation  of 
these  solitudes,  are  Wordsworth’s  central  themes.  These  pages  will 
seem  bleak,  untenanted  and  uninteresting  to  those  readers  who 
bring  to  them  the  quantitative  standard.  They  yield  their  burden 

108 


THE  COUNSELS  OF  PERFECTION 


of  beauty  and  meaning  only  to  those  who  understand  the  quali¬ 
tative  nobility  of  the  mind  of  Wordsworth. 

In  fact,  nine  tenths  of  our  difficulties  with  the  Christian  doc¬ 
trine  of  God’s  care  for  the  single  individual  rise  from  our  initial 
conception  of  God  as  the  business  manager  of  the  universe.  A 
large  employer  of  American  labor  commenting  upon  the  general 
labor  situation  in  New  England  has  said  that  most  of  the  present 
misunderstandings  arise  from  the  lost  contacts  between  the  head 
of  the  industry  and  the  operatives.  Formerly  the  head  of  the  busi¬ 
ness  knew  all  his  employees,  but  that  is  no  longer  possible,  and 
there  is  everywhere  a  sense  of  broken  human  relationships  between 
the  man  at  the  head  and  the  ranks  who  follow  him.  How  to  restore 
those  broken  human  contacts  is  the  major  human  problem  of 
modern  industry.  Our  theology  labors  under  the  same  difficulty. 
On  the  business  manager  theory  of  God’s  relation  to  the  world  of 
men  he  cannot  care  for  us  one  by  one.  And  Mr.  Wells  is  justified 
in  his  remark  that  he  does  not  want  a  God  who  can  afford  to  be 
bothered  with  him  eternally. 

Only  when  we  substitute  the  symbol  of  the  artist  for  the  execu¬ 
tive  does  the  doctrine  of  the  divine  solicitude  for  the  sparrow 
become  credible.  A  man  has  only  to  appeal  to  his  own  experience 
as  a  creative  artist,  no  matter  how  meager  and  imperfect  that 
experience  may  have  been,  to  understand  how  the  real  creator 
must  value  his  creation.  Every  one  of  us  has  hidden  away  in  some 
private  drawer,  under  his  own  lock  and  key,  a  poem  that  he  once 
tried  to  write,  a  picture  that  he  tried  to  draw.  He  values  these 
poor  things  because  they  represent,  not  his  quantitative  dealing 
with  the  world,  but  his  effort  at  qualitative  perfection.  He  will 
annually  clear  out  his  drawers  and  burn  the  accumulation  of  re¬ 
ceipted  bills  and  canceled  checks,  which  represent  his  volume  of 
business.  But  through  the  years  he  will  cling  to  those  youthful  and 
ardent  efforts  to  create,  because  those  creations  were  a  part  of 
himself.  They  never  lose  and  never  can  lose  their  value  to  him, 
individually,  because  they  are  mind  of  his  mind  and  heart  of  his 
heart. 

Now  Jesus’  realm  of  moral  values  is  far  more  truly  that  of  the 
artist’s  creative  effort  than  of  the  ledgers  of  the  business.  What 
gave  to  the  widow’s  two  mites  their  value  in  the  eye  of  Jesus  was 
their  moral  perfection.  Hers  was  a  qualitatively  finished  act,  al- 

109 


THE  DISCIPLINES  OF  LIBERTY 


though  her  alms  did  not  sound  quantitatively  so  loud  in  the 
“trumpet”  that  received  them.  And  what  revolted  Jesus  in  the 
tithes  of  mint,  anise  and  cummin,  those  meticulously  measured 
sprigs  from  the  kitchen  gardens  of  Jerusalem,  was  their  quanti¬ 
tative  precision  and  their  qualitative  worthlessness. 

Our  contemporary  moral  problem,  even  in  its  social  aspects, 
would  lose  something  of  its  perplexity  had  we  the  courage  to  take 
our  moral  stand  upon  the  aesthetic  judgment  which  Jesus  passed 
on  the  beauty  of  holiness.  The  social  gospel  will  always  be  a 
heart-breaking  business  if  it  is  interpreted  as  the  quantitative 
redemption  of  the  world.  The  single  individual  must  finally  be 
crushed  in  spirit  under  his  Atlas  burden  of  the  whole  world’s  sin 
and  need.  He  will  know  “the  cursed  spite  that  ever  he  was  bom 
to  set  it  right.”  The  prophetic  reluctance  to  face  single-handed 
the  cleansing  of  the  Augean  stables — “Ah,  Lord  God,  behold  I 
cannot  speak:  for  I  am  a  child” — has  about  it  suggestions  of  the 
quantitative  magnitude  and  hopelessness  of  the  total  task. 

But  Christianity,  surely,  was  not  meant  to  break  our  hearts 
and  crush  our  spirits.  And  the  social  gospel  is  not  meant  to  be  an 
occasion  for  final  pessimism.  “The  Evangelization  of  the  World 
in  This  Generation”  may  make  a  certain  appeal  to  the  adminis¬ 
trative  genius  of  contemporary  Christianity.  But  if  it  be  con¬ 
ceived  as  a  mere  matter  of  planting  mission  stations  so  thickly 
over  the  world  that  there  shall  not  be  any  ecclesiastical  No  Man’s 
Land  left  in  Thibet  or  Zambesi  or  New  Guinea,  it  makes  no  par¬ 
ticular  appeal  to  the  pure  moral  artistry  of  the  gospels.  True, 
Jesus  saw  “Satan  falling  from  heaven”  in  prophetic  vision.  But 
his  historical  method  of  fulfilling  that  vision  was  by  washing  the 
feet  of  a  few  friends,  by  solacing  the  penitent  thief  on  the  hard-by 
cross  and  by  forgiving  the  world  that  put  him  away. 

In  short,  our  contemporary  “evidences  of  Christianity”  are 
always  of  a  relatively  negligible  volume  in  their  quantity,  but  of 
qualitative  perfection  in  their  kind.  What  makes  us  believe  that 
Christianity  is  practicable  is  not  the  array  of  figures  in  the  Church 
Year  Book,  or  a  crowded  ecclesiastical  convention  hall  with  its 
interminable  resolutions  as  to  this  and  the  other  social  problem. 
Passing  resolutions  in  convention,  as  one  has  put  it,  is  “the  most 
harmless  form  of  amusement  the  human  mind  ever  devised.”  What 
convinces  us  that  we  can  be  perfect  as  God  is  perfect  is  the  single 


no 


THE  COUNSELS  OF  PERFECTION 


qualitatively  perfect  episode  which  falls  under  our  notice.  It  is 
the  stray  word  or  deed,  happened  upon  in  the  day’s  work,  which 
in  its  divine  perfection  stands  out  in  glorious  contrast  to  the 
philistine  morality. 

Some  little  child,  by  a  simple  and  utterly  Christlike  word, 
rebukes  and  corrects  the  sophisticated  wisdom  of  our  maturity. 
Some  sufferer  in  a  hospital  bears  the  world’s  burden  of  pain  with 
a  resilience  and  splendor  that  transmutes  the  whole  quality  of  pain, 
so  that  it  is  touched  again  for  us  with  the  moral  glory  of  the 
cross.  “I  wish,”  said  one  such,  dying  of  cancer,  “that  I  could 
gather  up  into  my  own  pain  all  that  the  world  must  suffer  from 
cancer  and  pay  the  whole  debt  as  I  go.”  In  such  a  temper  is  the 
qualitative  perfection  of  the  death  of  Christ,  which  no  quantita¬ 
tive  measure  of  pain  could  ever  reckon  or  achieve. 

The  Christian  life  is  a  morally  hopeless  enterprise  only  to  the 
disciple  who  has  not  yet  been  converted  from  the  world’s  rough 
and  ready  reckoning  of  the  volume  of  goodness.  Goodness  has  no 
volume.  There  is  about  it,  ultimately,  the  arbitrariness  which 
belongs  to  the  conceptions  of  time  and  space.  Infinite  goodness, 
like  infinite  time  and  infinite  space,  means  nothing  the  human 
mind  can  grasp.  What  there  is  in  God  is  “Eternal  Goodness.” 
Whittier  knew  it.  And  this  eternal  moral  life  may  be  as  perfectly 
experienced  in  “twenty  minutes  of  reality”  as  in  those  nine  hun¬ 
dred  sixty  and  nine  years  which,  at  times,  must  have  palled  upon 
Methuselah!  “The  life  of  God,”  says  Aristotle  in  one  flaming 
sentence  of  the  “Metaphysics,”  “is  eternally  like  our  life  at  its 
rare  best  moments.” 

The  character  of  Christ  is  in  its  quality  eternally  like  our 
Christianity  in  its  rare,  best  moments,  those  moments  when  we 
know  what  it  is  to  be  perfect  as  our  Father  is  perfect.  The  world 
does  not  give  that  quality,  therefore  the  world  cannot  take  it 
away.  A  man  cannot  add  anything  unto  the  words  of  such  a 
record  nor  can  he  take  away  from  them.  There  can  be  more  books 
written  after  the  New  Testament,  there  never  will  be  a  more  per¬ 
fect  definition  of  religion  than  the  Sermon  on  the  Mount.  Life 
may  multiply  our  experiences  of  perfection  as  the  years  go  on, 
but  life  never  adds  anything  to  the  single  moment  or  the  single, 
splendid,  human  situation  when  men  know  what  it  is  to  be  perfect 
as  their  Father  in  heaven  is  perfect. 


hi 


CHAPTER  VII. 


The  Scientific  Method  and  the 
Religious  Spirit. 


IN  December,  1911,  Captain  Robert  Scott  started  on  his 
thousand-mile  journey  across  the  Antarctic  Ice  Barrier  to  the 
South  Pole.  He  took  with  him  as  medical  officer  of  the  polar 
party  Dr.  Edward  A.  Wilson.  Wilson  finally  perished  with  Scott 
on  the  return  journey  from  the  Pole  when,  without  food  and  fuel, 
they  were  overtaken  on  the  open  ice  by  a  driving  blizzard  and  by 
incredible  cold. 

“Scott’s  Last  Expedition,”  duly  chronicled  in  two  volumes, 
added  its  modicum  to  the  meager  body  of  polar  knowledge.  But 
its  major  bequest  to  our  time  is  the  memory  of  the  spirit  which 
from  first  to  last  sustained  and  inspired  it.  That  spirit  was  in 
part  the  doggedness  of  England.  At  a  time  when  the  modern 
world  was  beginning  to  doubt  the  virility  of  the  Anglo-Saxon, 
these  men  proved,  in  Scott’s  words,  written  to  J.  M.  Barrie  just 
before  the  end,  that  “Englishmen  can  still  die  with  a  bold  spirit, 
fighting  it  out  to  the  end.”  The  courage  of  these  men  was  an 
earnest  of  that  heroism  which  so  soon  after  and  so  suddenly  was 
to  know  a  rebirth  in  history. 

In  other  and  equal  part,  this  spirit  was  the  genius  of  modern 
science  at  its  best,  the  dispassionate  quest  for  knowledge,  the  love 
of  truth  for  its  own  sake.  Among  the  most  precious  heritages 
which  gather  around  the  memory  of  these  few  men  is  a  little  poem 
which  Dr.  Wilson  sent  to  the  South  Polar  Times  just  before  he 
set  out,  a  poem  which  is  both  a  premonition  of  the  final  tragic  fact, 
and  a  clear  witness  to  the  scientist’s  method  and  purpose. 

The  Silence  was  deep  with  a  breath  like  sleep 
As  our  sled  runners  slid  on  the  snow, 

But  the  fate-full  fall  of  our  fur-clad  feet 
Struck  mute  like  a  silent  blow 


1 1 2 


SCIENTIFIC  METHOD  AND  RELIGION 


On  a  questioning  “Hush?”  as  the  settling  crust 
Shrank  shivering  over  the  floe. 

And  a  voice  that  was  thick  from  a  soul  that  seemed  sick 
Came  back  from  the  Barrier :  “Go ! 

For  the  secrets  hidden  are  all  forbidden 
Till  God  means  man  to  know.” 

And  this  was  the  thought  that  the  silence  wrought, 

As  it  scorched  and  froze  us  through, 

That  we  were  the  men  God  meant  should  know 
The  heart  of  the  Barrier  snow, 

By  the  heat  of  the  sun,  and  the  glow 
And  the  glare  from  the  glistening  floe, 

As  it  scorched  and  froze  us  through  and  through 
With  the  bite  of  the  drifting  snow. 

As  a  rival  interpretation  of  life  one  might  set  over  against 
these  lines  a  stanza  from  Francis  Thompson’s  “Nineteenth  Cen¬ 
tury.”  He  tells  the  roster  of  the  poets  of  that  century  and  then, 
thinking  of  Charles  Darwin  and  earthworms  and  vegetable  mold, 
he  admits  sadly  that  it  was  not  to  her  great  poets  that  England 
gave  her  loyalty,  during  the  century  gone. 

But  not  to  these 

She  gave  her  heart;  her  heart  she  gave 
To  the  blind  worm  that  bores  the  mold, 

Bloodless,  pertinacious,  cold, 

Unweeting  what  itself  upturns. 

The  seer  and  prophet  of  the  grave. 

It  reared  its  head  from  off  the  earth 
(Which  gives  it  life  and  gave  it  birth) 

And  placed  upon  its  eyeless  head  a  crown, 

Thereon  a  name  writ  new, 

“Science,”  erstwhile  with  ampler  meanings  known; 

And  all  the  people  in  their  turns 

Before  the  blind  worm  bowed  them  down. 

Yet  crowned  beyond  its  due, 

It  is  a  thing  of  sightless  prophecies. 

There  is  no  doubt  which  is  the  better  verse.  As  a  poet  Francis 
Thompson  stands  almost  alone  in  the  last  half  century.  He  had  an 
unmatched  skill  in  the  handling  of  the  literary  medium.  Beside 
the  precision  and  adroitness  of  Thompson’s  lines  the  doctor’s 
verse  is  the  crude  and  bungling  effort  of  a  prosy  layman.  But  it 
is  a  fair  question  which  of  these  two  points  of  view  comes  nearer 
to  voicing  the  central  temper  of  our  age.  At  the  best  Francis 

113 


THE  DISCIPLINES  OF  LIBERTY 


Thompson,  the  minnesinger  of  an  evanescent  beauty,  had  little 
understanding  of  the  moral  passion  which  inspires  the  sober  real¬ 
ism  of  the  scientific  spirit.  For  all  his  fumbling  and  unmetrical 
lines  the  polar  doctor  caught  the  central  nobility  of  the  genius  of 
science,  the  conviction  that  the  love  of  truth  for  its  own  sake  is 
essentially  a  religious  passion. 

Of  all  the  wars  of  history  none,  perhaps,  has  involved  such 
spiritual  misery  as  “The  Warfare  between  Science  and  Religion.” 
The  initial  bitterness  of  that  struggle  is  now  past.  Huxley  no 
longer  rages  about  the  world  “smiting  the  Amalekites.”  Bishop 
Wilberforce  no  longer  imagines  vain  things.  The  religionist  and  the 
scientist  have  both  seen  the  folly  of  a  war  of  mutual  extermina¬ 
tion.  They  have  agreed  to  live  and  let  live  and  to  traffic  with  one 
another  through  interpreters.  But  there  is  still  lacking,  in  the 
main,  any  actual  communism  of  aim  and  effort.  “To  the  scientist 
the  earth  must  forever  roll  around  the  central  solar  fire;  to  the 
poet  the  sun  must  forever  set  behind  the  western  hills.” 

The  failure  to  establish  any  permanent  peace  between  these 
two  great  human  interests  rests  very  largely  upon  the  mistaken 
attempt  to  discover  and  to  establish  an  actual  identity  between 
the  findings  of  science  and  the  fruits  of  religious  experience.  The 
two  very  often  seem  to  coincide,  but  only  to  diverge  again,  and  to 
baffle  those  who  would  identify  them.  Henry  Drummond’s  ambi¬ 
tious  attempt  to  establish  an  identity  between  the  laws  of  nature 
and  the  laws  of  the  spiritual  life  broke  down  in  the  end.  He  points 
out  many  suggestive  parallels,  which  have  a  certain  rough  ex¬ 
change  value  when  the  mental  coin  of  the  one  realm  is  cashed  into 
the  currency  of  the  other  realm.  But  there  his  effort,  and  that  of 
every  other  kindred  thinker,  begins  and  ends. 

If  religion  and  science  are  ever  to  see  eye  to  eye  they  must 
approach  one  another  on  a  different  premise.  Bertrand  Russell 
says,  in  one  of  his  essays: 

“There  are  two  different  ways  in  which  a  philosophy  may  seek 
to  base  itself  upon  science.  It  may  emphasize  the  most  general 
results  of  science,  and  seek  to  give  even  greater  generality  and 
unity  to  these  results.  Or  it  may  study  the  methods  of  science, 
and  seek  to  apply  these  methods,  with  necessary  adaptations,  to 
its  own  peculiar  province.  Much  philosophy  inspired  by  science 
has  gone  astray  through  preoccupation  with  the  results  momen- 

114 


SCIENTIFIC  METHOD  AND  RELIGION 


tarily  supposed  to  have  been  achieved.  It  is  not  results,  but 
methods,  that  can  be  transferred  with  profit  from  the  sphere  of 
the  special  sciences  to  the  sphere  of  philosophy.” 

In  so  far  as  every  religion  is  a  philosophy  of  life  these  words 
hold  equally  true  of  the  relation  between  science  and  religion. 
Modern  Protestantism,  as  we  so  often  remind  ourselves,  is  not  a 
body  of  belief,  but  a  method  of  belief.  Loyalty  to  the  method  is 
even  more  central  with  the  Protestant  than  concern  with  particu¬ 
lar  results.  “Love  and  do  what  you  like,”  was  Augustine’s  defini¬ 
tion  of  Christianity.  We  busy  ourselves  to-day  to  make  the  tree 
of  life  good  in  the  assurance  that  having  done  so  good  fruits  must 
follow  in  due  and  inevitable  season.  The  initial  heresy  for  the 
freeman  is  that  Jesuitical  casuistry  which  begins  by  suggesting 
that  a  religious  end  justifies  an  irreligious  means,  and  which  con¬ 
cludes  by  vitiating  both  faith  and  conduct.  As  against  such  an 
ethic  we  hold  that  no  significant  result  can  be  reached  by  a  wrong 
method,  and  that  every  result  of  a  right  method  must  be  valid 
and  precious.  In  short,  the  problems  of  modern  faith  and  con¬ 
duct  are  not  so  much  problems  of  “What,”  as  problems  of  “How.” 

It  is  precisely  at  this  point  that  religion  and  science  can  meet 
without  private  reservations  and  without  mutual  misunderstanding 
and  recrimination  upon  the  basis  of  a  common  method.  It  is  not 
so  much  the  findings  of  the  scientific  method  as  the  initial  temper 
and  permanent  moral  quality  of  the  method  which  make  the 
modern  scientist  so  essentially  a  religious  man  at  the  center  of  his 
character.  For  the  intellectual  mood  which  speaks  out  in  those 
halting  lines  of  the  expedition’s  doctor  on  the  Antarctic  Barrier  is 
very  near  what  we  mean  by  the  mind’s  pure  love  of  God. 

For  the  secrets  hidden  are  all  forbidden, 

Till  God  means  man  to  know. 

And  this  was  the  thought  that  the  silence  wrought 

^  %  sf5  % 

That  we  were  the  men  God  meant  should  know. 

In  his  life  of  Saint  Louis,  the  French  chronicler  Joinville  tells 
of  a  Saracen  woman  seen  on  the  streets  of  Damascus,  carrying  a 
pan  of  fire  in  one  hand  and  a  jug  of  water  in  the  other.  When 
asked  by  a  monk  what  she  intended  to  do  with  these  things,  she 
answered,  “Burn  up  Paradise  and  put  out  the  fires  of  hell,  so  that 

ii5 


THE  DISCIPLINES  OF  LIBERTY 


men  may  do  good  for  the  love  of  God.”  True  religion  always  has 
to  resist  the  doctrine  of  rewards  and  punishments,  because  they 
demean  the  essential  nature  of  the  spiritual  life.  They  introduce 
prudential  and  self-contemplating  motives  into  a  relationship 
which  ought  to  be  inspired  and  sustained  by  love  alone.  When  a 
man  begins  to  calculate  upon  the  profit  and  loss  involved  in  his 
human  affections  he  is  undermining  the  very  foundations  of  the 
life  of  love.  He  certainly  must  not  marry  because  he  can  get  a 
housekeeper  cheaper  in  that  way  than  in  any  other.  If  we  can 
take  Elizabeth  Barrett  Browning  at  her  word  the  lover  may  not 
even  say, 

“I  love  her  for  her  smile — her  look — her  way 
Of  speaking  gently, — for  a  trick  of  thought 
That  falls  in  well  with  mine,  and  certes  brought 
A  sense  of  pleasant  ease  on  such  a  day,” 

For  these  things  in  themselves,  Beloved,  may 
Be  changed,  or  change  for  thee.  .  .  . 

But  love  me  for  love’s  sake,  that  evermore 
Thou  mayst  love  on,  through  love’s  eternity. 

What  is  true  of  our  human  affections  is  true  of  the  life  of 
religion.  We  are  not  to  love  God  because  we  draw  a  passing  intel¬ 
lectual  or  aesthetic  pleasure  from  the  act  of  worship.  We  may  not 
love  God  because  we  feel  the  sting  of  the  incentive  of  reward  and 
punishment.  There  is  only  one  way  to  love  God,  and  that  is  for 
love’s  sake,  that  we  may  love  on  through  love’s  eternity. 

The  mediaeval  mystic  has  much  to  say  of  what  he  called  “the 
unmercenary  love  of  God.”  The  Sons  of  Martha,  who  predominate 
in  contemporary  Christianity,  always  find  it  hard  to  understand 
the  “lone,  sad,  sunny  idleness”  of  the  Sons  of  Mary.  There  cer¬ 
tainly  is  no  feature  of  the  mystic’s  conception  of  the  religious  life 
which  is  more  difficult  for  a  commercial  age  to  understand  or  more 
remote  from  our  generally  utilitarian  and  pragmatic  temper  than 
this  same  unmercenary  temper  of  the  mystic.  But  for  that  very 
reason  there  is  no  single  aspect  of  mysticism  which  needs  greater 
emphasis  at  the  present  moment.  The  mystic’s  psychological  in¬ 
tuitions  were  accurate  even  though  he  had  no  formal  psychology 
to  aid  his  account  of  experience.  And  his  ethical  intuitions  were 
at  many  points  far  keener  and  more  discriminating  than  those  of 
the  modern  workaday  churchgoer. 

116 


SCIENTIFIC  METHOD  AND  RELIGION 


The  nameless  author  of  the  “Theologia  Germanica,”  that  match¬ 
less  manual  of  the  selfless  spiritual  life,  classifies  religious  men  in 
four  groups — those  who  practice  religion  because  they  fear  the 
penalties  and  punishments  which  attach  to  irreligion,  those  who 
are  drawn  to  religion  by  the  promised  rewards  of  an  ultimate 
felicity,  those  who  are  sustained  by  a  Pharisaic  self-righteousness, 
and  those  who  love  religion  for  its  own  sake.  The  mystic  regards 
the  first  three  types  as  at  the  best  proselytes  of  the  gate.  They 
really  do  not  understand  what  transpires  in  the  Holy  of  Holies. 
It  is  the  latter  group  alone  who  really  deserve  the  name  “re¬ 
ligious.” 

“This  is  our  answer  to  the  question,  ‘If  a  man  by  putting  on 
Christ’s  life,  can  get  nothing  more  than  he  hath  already,  and  serve 
no  end,  what  good  will  it  do  him?’  This  life  is  not  chosen  in  order 
to  serve  any  end,  or  to  get  anything  by  it,  but  for  love  of  its 
nobleness,  and  because  God  loveth  and  esteemeth  it  so  greatly. 
And  whosoever  saith  that  he  hath  had  enough  of  it,  and  may  now 
lay  it  aside,  hath  never  tasted  nor  known  it;  for  he  who  hath 
truly  felt  or  tasted  it,  can  never  give  it  up  again.  And  he  who  hath 
put  on  the  life  of  Christ  with  the  intent  to  win  or  deserve  ought 
thereby,  hath  taken  it  up  as  a  hireling  and  not  for  love,  and  is 
altogether  without  it.  For  he  who  doth  not  take  it  up  for  love  hath 
none  of  it  at  all;  he  may  dream  indeed  that  he  hath  put  it  on, 
but  he  is  deceived.  Christ  did  not  lead  such  a  life  as  his  for  the 
sake  of  reward,  but  out  of  love;  and  love  maketh  such  a  life  light 
and  taketh  away  all  its  hardships  so  that  it  becometh  sweet  and  is 
gladly  endured.  But  to  him  who  hath  not  put  it  on  for  love,  but 
hath  done  so,  as  he  dreameth,  for  the  sake  of  reward,  it  is  utterly 
bitter  and  a  weariness,  and  he  fain  would  be  quit  of  it.  .  .  .  God 
rejoiceth  more  over  one  man  who  truly  loveth,  than  over  a  thou¬ 
sand  hirelings.  .  .  .  For  a  lover  of  God  is  better  and  dearer  to 
Him  than  a  hundred  thousand  hirelings.” 

Modern  theology,  with  its  doctrine  of  one  world  at  a  time,  has 
in  some  measure  completed  the  dramatic  task  which  the  Saracen 
woman  undertook  on  the  streets  of  Damascus.  The  fear  of  pun¬ 
ishment  and  the  hope  of  rewards  hereafter  figure  little  or  not  at 
all  in  the  motives  to  the  Christian  life  of  to-day.  The  doctrine  of 
one  world  at  a  time  has  supplanted  the  elder  doctrines  of  heaven 
and  hell.  But  this  does  not  mean  that  the  mercenary  temper  has 

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been  exorcised.  All  that  we  have  done  in  dismissing  hell  as  a 
threat  and  heaven  as  an  inducement  from  our  religious  appeal,  is 
to  substitute  for  the  highly  fictitious  torments  of  Gehenna  some 
of  the  known  punishments  in  this  present  world  for  a  godless  life, 
and  for  the  highly  colored  felicities  of  Paradise  certain  immediate 
substantial  compensations  for  the  godly  life.  Our  modem  Chris¬ 
tianity  has  not  abandoned  the  mercenary  appeal.  It  has  merely 
changed  the  notation  in  the  logic.  The  sulphur  of  Sheol  is  sup¬ 
planted  in  the  present  argument  by  the  ravages  of  syphilis.  The 
remote  prospect  of  a  world  of  sardius  and  chrysoprase  is  a 
“dead  hypothesis”  to  the  average  man  of  to-day.  But  assure  him 
that  when  the  riot  of  Oriental  opulence  in  the  mind  of  the  apoca¬ 
lyptic  writer  is  “spiritualized”  it  means  a  generous  bank  balance 
and  a  country  estate  as  the  reward  of  Christian  integrity  in  busi¬ 
ness  and  you  commend  religion  to  him  with  real  effectiveness. 
The  waters  of  the  river  of  life  where  the  fathers  hoped  to  slake 
their  thirst  through  all  eternity  reappear  in  contemporary  piety  as 
Metchnikoff’s  sour  milk,  which  assures  us  of  another  ten  years  in 
this  vale  of  tears.  Emerson  said  that  “Five  minutes  of  to-day  is 
worth  as  much  to  me  as  five  minutes  of  eternity.”  The  religion  of 
healthy-mindedness  intimates  that  it  is  worth  a  good  deal  more. 
Better  fifty  years  of  the  world  we  know  than  a  cycle  of  the 
Apocalyptic  Cathay.  The  “red-blooded”  muscular  Christian  of 
to-day  gets  up  very  little  enthusiasm  about  joining  the  hundred 
and  forty  and  four  thousand  who  come  out  of  great  tribulation  to 
stand  before  the  throne  of  the  Lamb,  but  he  is  always  ready  to 
join  a  class  for  “setting-up  exercises.”  The  corpus  sanurn  is  a 
much  more  potent  appeal  for  present-day  piety  than  the  pain- 
drenched  body  of  the  martyr.  But  all  this  is  simply  a  restatement 
of  the  doctrine  of  rewards  and  punishments. 

In  short,  a  certain  familiar  type  of  modern  religion,  following 
modern  business,  does  not  approach  a  man  with  a  highly  prob¬ 
lematical  investment  which  may  ultimately  declare  dispropor¬ 
tionately  large  dividends;  it  asks  him  to  invest  in  an  ethical 
proposition  where  the  moral  capital  is  kept  turning  over  all  the 
time,  and  from  which  modest  but  immediate  dividends  are  paid 
regularly.  What  gives  to  the  whole  Christian  Science  and  New 
Thought  movement  its  particular  appeal  to  our  time  is  this  busi- 

1 18 


SCIENTIFIC  METHOD  AND  RELIGION 


nesslike  identification  of  the  spiritual  life  with  its  returns  in  the 
currency  of  this  present  world. 

The  common  logic  of  the  average  apologia  for  Christianity 
to-day  is  bound  up  with  the  conception  that  it  pays  here  and  now 
to  be  a  Christian,  pays  in  health,  wealth  and  long  life.  This  fa¬ 
miliar  mercenary  argument  for  the  spiritual  life  is  candidly  Old 
Testament  in  its  point  of  view.  It  savors  of  Jacob’s  covenant.  It 
reflects  the  temper  of  the  Book  of  Deuteronomy,  which  took  no 
more  interest  in  the  dividends  of  religion  in  the  hereafter  than  we 
take.  The  difficulty  which  attaches  to  the  doctrine  of  reliable 
rewards  and  punishments  for  the  religious  life  in  the  terms  of 
creature  well-being,  springs  from  a  rankly  individualistic  theory  of 
the  moral  life,  which  has  no  solid  ground  in  the  facts.  Lecky 
points  out  that  the  whole  force  of  this  argument  depends  upon 
the  immediate  organization  of  the  given  society  in  which  the  in¬ 
dividual  happens  to  find  himself,  “For  there  are  undoubtedly  some 
conditions  of  society  in  which  a  perfectly  upright  life  has  not 
even  a  general  tendency  to  prosperity.”  It  is  certainly  true  that 
“the  sin  we  sin  by  two  and  two  we  pay  for  one  by  one.”  Moral 
evil  seems  to  end  in  a  certain  terrible  isolation,  since  it  disinte¬ 
grates  society.  The  loneliness  of  the  sinner  is  his  ultimate  direst 
punishment.  But  conversely  the  sins  that  we  sin  one  by  one  cannot 
be  isolated  in  their  effect  and  others  are  dragged  into  the  wake  of 
their  unhappy  consequences.  Likewise  the  effects  of  private  virtue 
cannot  be  monopolized  by  the  truly  moral  man  but  become  a 
fund  of  achieved  labor  into  which  others  enter.  In  short,  Bosan- 
quet  sums  up  the  incredibility  of  all  attempts  to  determine  a  com¬ 
mensurate  relation  between  the  individual’s  moral  nature  and  his 
creature  status  in  society  when  he  says: 

“If  you  could,  or  so  far  as  you  think  you  can,  find  a  basis  and 
rule  of  apportionment  to  units  taken  as  separate,  the  results 
considered  from  an  adequate  point  of  view  would  certainly  be 
repulsive  to  us  in  their  details,  and  would  contradict  the  con¬ 
ception  of  unity  in  happiness  and  suffering.  .  .  .  If  we  are  ar¬ 
ranging  any  system  of  enterprise  of  a  really  intimate  character 
for  persons  closely  united  in  mind  and  thoroughly  penetrated  with 
the  spirit  of  the  whole — persons  not  at  arm’s  length  to  one  another 
— all  the  presuppositions  of  an  individualistic  justice  at  once  fall 
to  the  ground.  We  do  not  give  the  ‘best’  man  the  most  comfort, 

119 


THE  DISCIPLINES  OF  LIBERTY 


the  easiest  task,  or  even,  so  far  as  the  conduct  of  the  enterprise 
is  concerned,  the  highest  reward.  We  give  him  the  greatest  respon¬ 
sibility,  the  severest  toil  and  hazard,  the  most  continuous  and 
exacting  toil  and  self-sacrifice.  .  .  .  We  may  think  of  the  honours 
and  rewards  that  have  come  to  the  great  poets  of  the  world.  .  .  . 
Plainly,  there  is  no  word  to  be  spoken  of  any  proportion  between 
these  and  their  services  to  the  world.  .  .  .  There  is  no  just  pro¬ 
portion  between  their  deserts  and  their  treatment.” 

The  modern  mercenary  argument  for  religion,  then,  must  come 
up  ultimately  against  its  Job.  Mr.  Wells  tells  us  that  “all  the 
world  is  now  Job.”  He  has  somewhat  anticipated  the  course  of  con¬ 
temporary  religious  history.  Mr.  Wells  is  Job  because  the  merce¬ 
nary  logic  irks  his  soul.  Years  ago  he  assailed  Mr.  Norman  Angell’s 
thesis  that  war  does  not  pay,  as  a  double-edged  and  dangerous 
sword  to  play  with  morally.  Because,  as  he  then  said,  nothing  that 
is  really  noble  pays,  poetry  does  not  pay,  music  does  not  pay,  love 
does  not  pay,  religion  does  not  pay.  But  in  the  main,  the  modern 
mind  is  a  good  deal  nearer  the  position  of  Eliphaz,  Bildad  and  Zo- 
phar,  who  held  that  religion  paid,  than  it  is  to  the  mind  of  Job, 
who  held  that  religion  does  not  pay.  The  preacher  of  to-day  who 
launches  his  religious  appeal  with  the  statement  that  very  probably 
it  may  not  pay  here  and  now  in  the  coin  of  this  world  to  be  a 
Christian,  will  have  to  spend  the  rest  of  the  sermon  hour  trying  to 
regain  the  sympathy  and  interest  which  he  will  certainly  alienate 
by  his  initial  admission.  For  the  Yankee  in  us  all  answers,  “If  it 
doesn’t  pay  here  and  now  to  be  a  Christian  what  is  the  use  of 
Christianity?” 

Saint  Paul  understood  the  answer  to  this  question  when  he  said 
that  we  must  judge  spiritual  things  by  spiritual,  that  there  is  no 
bank  of  moral  exchange  in  nature  and  history  whereby  we  can 
transmute  the  investment  of  a  genuinely  religious  devotion  into 
an  equivalent  amount  of  temporal  well-being.  The  ethical  su¬ 
periority  of  the  New  Testament  to  the  Old  rests  very  largely  in 
its  answer  to  the  problem  of  the  Book  of  Job,  a  problem  to  which 
the  Old  Testament  found  no  clear  satisfactory  solution.  Jesus’ 
conception  of  the  sequence  of  cause  and  effect  in  the  spiritual  life 
is  as  far  removed  from  the  conception  of  cause  and  effect  in 
Jacob’s  shrewd  bargain  with  the  Almighty  as  East  from  West. 
And  never  the  twain  shall  meet  in  ethics.  As  a  matter  of  fact, 


120 


SCIENTIFIC  METHOD  AND  RELIGION 


Jesus  promised  to  his  disciples  pretty  much  the  reverse  of  all  that 
the  Old  Testament  had  offered  as  the  results  of  a  religious  life; 
instead  of  long  life  the  prospect  of  martyrdom,  instead  of  health 
hunger  and  nakedness,  instead  of  wealth  the  penury  of  disciple- 
ship.  There  is  very  little  of  the  coin  of  this  realm  held  out  to  men 
in  the  gospels  as  an  inducement  to  discipleship.  What  is  the  effect 
of  which  true  discipleship  is  a  cause?  “Peace  I  leave  with  you,  my 
peace  I  give  unto  you:  not  as  the  world  giveth,  give  I  unto  you.” 
The  Christian  life  is,  and  in  the  very  nature  of  the  case  must  be, 
its  own  reward.  It  is  the  joy  of  a  clear  conscience,  faith,  hope  and 
love,  and  kindred  abiding  realities  of  which  the  mystic  says,  “the 
internal  is  also  the  eternal.”  Such  is  Rhodes’s  point  of  view  when 
he  says  of  John  Brown  of  Ossawatomie,  “God  has  honoured  but 
comparatively  a  small  part  of  mankind  with  such  mighty  and  soul- 
satisfying  rewards.” 

It  has  been  said  that  two  symbols  exhaust  all  possible  concep¬ 
tions  of  the  religious  life,  the  symbol  of  money  and  the  symbol  of 
love.  The  doctrine  of  rewards  and  punishments,  whether  it  is 
applied  to  eternity  or  to  the  three  score  years  and  ten,  whether 
it  talks  in  terms  of  sulphur  and  amethyst  or  of  delirium  tremens 
and  bank  balances,  is  cast  in  the  symbolism  of  a  money  transac¬ 
tion.  The  whole  argument  is  alien  to  the  spirit  of  Jesus.  The  most 
that  Jesus  would  say  is  that  all  these  things  after  which  the 
Gentiles  seek  shall  be  added  unto  you  as  the  by-products  of  a 
religious  life  in  a  truly  religious  world.  But  even  in  the  perfected 
Kingdom  of  God  on  earth  they  do  not  remain  the  objects  of  our 
efforts  and  aspiration.  At  the  best  they  are  happy  incidents  of 
the  soul’s  love  of  God  for  God’s  own  sake. 

It  takes  only  a  single  exception  to  wreck  an  abstract  system. 
You  need  only  to  have  known  one  good  woman  dead  of  cancer 
after  a  life  of  devotion  to  home  and  children  and  God’s  work  in 
the  world,  to  be  face  to  face  with  the  Book  of  Job  again.  You  need 
only  to  have  seen  a  single  idealistic  business  man  who  has  con¬ 
scientiously  tried  to  be  a  Christian  in  trade  or  industry,  but  who 
has  gone  to  the  wall  in  the  effort,  to  realize  that  the  cheap  and 
easy  logic  which  tells  you  that  it  always  pays  in  dollars  and  cents 
to  be  a  Christian  business  man  rests  not  on  facts  but  on  the  hope 
of  recruits  for  churches  and  the  like.  The  ethical  relation  between 
a  man’s  inner  spiritual  life  and  his  physical  status  in  body  and 


1 2  I 


THE  DISCIPLINES  OF  LIBERTY 


circumstance  involve  social  problems  so  intricate  and  baffling  that 
it  is  all  but  impossible  to  establish  any  direct  connection  between 
our  Christian  character  and  our  condition  in  this  present  world. 
In  a  perfect  Christian  world  there  would  be,  unquestionably, 
some  direct  and  intelligible  connection  between  the  soul  of  hu¬ 
manity  and  its  temporal  circumstance.  But  in  an  imperfect  and 
half-pagan  age,  when  every  man’s  health,  wealth  and  temporal 
happiness  are  affected  in  a  thousand  ways  by  the  environing  world, 
it  is  little  short  of  injustice  and  cruelty  to  credulous  minds  to 
isolate  the  individual  from  his  social  setting  and  to  preach  to  him 
the  sequences  of  moral  cause  and  effect  in  his  own  case  on  the 
basis  of  the  present  paying  dividends  of  the  Christian  life.  Christ 
has  many  genuine  disciples  in  our  time  with  whom,  as  the  world 
goes,  things  stand  well.  But  he  has  as  many  or  more  with  whom 
things  have  gone  hard,  whose  devotion  to  the  world  of  the  spirit 
has  been  matched  by  pain,  disease,  neglect,  failure,  sorrow;  to 
whom  the  money  symbol  is  meaningless.  They  simply  know  that 
in  the  coin  of  this  realm  it  does  not  seem  to  pay  to  be  Christians. 
And  if  they  are  to  be  repaid,  if  there  is  any  reliable  cause  and 
effect  in  religion,  their  payment  must  come  in  another  coinage. 
We  are  not  only  giving  the  lie  to  countless  facts  when  we  preach 
the  cheap  and  easy  doctrine  that  Christianity  is  always  worth 
while  here  and  now  in  the  terms  of  the  world’s  values,  we  are 
making  infinite  perplexity  and  trouble  for  the  future,  and  be¬ 
queathing  to  those  who  will  finally  know  the  anger  and  alienation 
from  religion  occasioned  by  our  short-sighted  logic,  the  moral 
problem  which  the  Old  Testament  passed  on  to  the  New. 

Nothing,  then,  is  so  much  needed  in  modern  Christianity  as  a 
revival  and  a  restatement  in  the  terms  of  contemporary  thought  of 
the  mediaeval  doctrine  of  the  unmercenary  love  of  God,  which  is 
essentially  Christ’s  doctrine.  If  Christianity  is  to  be  permanently 
saved  for  the  world  it  must  be  dissociated  from  the  lower  appeal 
which  so  often  characterizes  our  present-day  preaching. 

John  Calvin,  in  an  early  chapter  of  the  “Institutes,”  makes  the 
flat  statement  that  the  Essence  of  God  is  incomprehensible.  He 
does  not  hesitate  to  ally  himself  with  the  agnostics.  God  is  known 
to  us  only  through  his  attributes  discernible  in  man  and  nature. 
The  modem  poet  very  beautifully  pictures  certain  features  of 
nature  and  human  life  and  then  says  of  each  in  turn,  “Some  of 


122 


SCIENTIFIC  METHOD  AND  RELIGION 

us  call  it  Evolution-Autumn-Longing-Consecration,  And  others 
call  it  God.”  So  far  from  being  a  pantheist  or  a  latitudinarian  he  is 
perfectly  true  to  the  most  rigid  orthodoxy.  A  religious  experience, 
at  its  heart,  is  just  the  winning  of  the  insight  which  enables  us  to 
say  “God”  where  formerly  we  had  said  “Evolution”  or  “Conse¬ 
cration.”  Now  the  major  attributes  of  God  for  the  modern  mind 
must  be  the  ideas  of  Beauty,  Duty,  and  Truth,  associated  severally 
with  our  aesthetic,  moral  and  intellectual  judgments. 

If  a  man  were  to  talk  to  a  twentieth-century  congregation  about 
the  unmercenary  love  of  God  he  would  be  speaking  a  dead  theo¬ 
logical  language.  But  when  he  restates  that  idea  as  “Art  for  Art’s 
Sake”  he  plunges  at  once  into  one  of  the  major  discussions  of  the 
day.  Infinite  pages  of  dreary  controversy  have  been  circulated  on 
this  subject.  But  at  the  heart  of  it  there  is  a  genuinely  religious 
idea,  namely,  that  the  perception  of  beauty  is  its  own  sufficient 
compensation.  No  one  can  believe  that  John  Masefield’s  medita¬ 
tive  sonnets  on  the  quest  of  beauty  were  written  with  an  eye  to 
the  main  chance  by  way  of  author’s  royalties. 

If  I  should  come  again  to  that  dear  place 

Where  once  I  came,  where  Beauty  lived  and  moved, 

Where  by  the  sea,  I  saw  her  face  to  face, 

That  soul  alive  by  which  the  world  has  loved; 

If  as  I  stood  at  gaze  among  the  leaves, 

She  would  appear  again,  as  once  before, 

«lv  »lr  %1# 

m  *p 

Joy  with  its  searing-iron  would  burn  me  wise, 

I  should  know  all;  all  powers,  all  mysteries. 

Francis  Thompson  seems  to  have  allowed  no  copyright  on  his 
published  poems. 

He  lives  detached  days; 

He  serveth  not  for  praise; 

For  gold 
He  is  not  sold: 

He  measureth  world’s  pleasure, 

World’s  ease,  as  Saint  might  measure; 

For  hire 
Just  love  entire 
He  asks. 


123 


THE  DISCIPLINES  OF  LIBERTY 


There  are  in  all  our  great  cities  in  third  floors  back,  in  attic 
studios,  living  from  hand  to  mouth,  countless,  nameless  young 
men  and  women  to  whom  religion  as  the  unmercenary  love  of 
beauty  through  music,  painting,  sculpture,  letters,  is  the  central 
reality  of  life.  There  is  a  certain  flavor  of  mediaeval  asceticism 
in  their  “Contemptus  mundi  ”  They  refuse  to  be  the  hirelings  of  a 
mercenary  time,  preferring  to  be  the  lovers  of  God  as  he  is  re¬ 
vealed  to  them  in  the  disciplines  and  compensations  of  their  art. 

So  there  are  in  these  same  cities  of  Mammon  any  number  of 
men  and  women  who  seldom  think  of  themselves  as  being  religious 
in  any  conventional  manner,  but  to  whom  the  unmercenary  love 
of  Duty  is  an  ever  present  moral  motive.  The  lover  of  his  human 
kind  never  forgets  that  in  the  moment  of  risk  or  peril  the  average 
man  may  be  relied  upon  to  do  his  duty.  And  this  doing  of  duty 
in  no  way  depends  upon  the  wage  paid,  the  prospect  of  a  Carnegie 
medal  or  the  popular  subscription  for  the  hero  of  the  moment. 
The  man  in  question  does  his  duty  because  it  is  his  duty,  and  it 
never  occurs  to  him  that  he  is  more  than  an  unprofitable  servant 
because  he  has  done  that  which  he  ought  to  have  done.  The  fire¬ 
man,  the  policeman,  the  railroad  engineer,  the  ship’s  master,  the 
nurse,  all  who  in  their  own  ways  are  daily  sustained  and  in  the 
moment  of  crisis  transfigured  by  this  central  passion,  very  often 
come  a  great  deal  nearer  to  the  deeper  essence  of  real  religion  than 
the  less  devoted  and  single-minded  folk  in  the  sheltered  classes  of 
society  who  make  up  the  congregations  of  our  churches.  For 
wherever  there  is  an  unmercenary  love  of  Duty  there  is  the  Chris¬ 
tian  religion  in  its  original  austerity  and  nobility. 

But  this  old  idea  of  the  selfless  love  of  God  finds  its  best  modern 
exemplar  in  the  scientist’s  unmercenary  love  of  Truth.  This  is 
the  major  contribution  of  the  scientific  spirit  to  contemporary 
Christianity.  The  contribution  is  seldom  or  almost  never  noticed 
and  pointed  out.  What  gives  to  modern  science  at  its  best  a  cer¬ 
tain  ascetic  single-mindedness  is  this  characteristic  intellectual 
temper  and  attitude.  In  this  respect  modern  science  stands  in 
sharp  contrast  to  the  self-regarding  and  generally  mercenary  spirit 
of  much  of  our  apologia  for  present-day  Christianity.  And  should 
a  man  ever  have  to  cast  his  lot  with  one  of  these  interests  as 
against  another,  Christian  history  as  a  whole  would  warrant  him 
in  throwing  in  his  spiritual  fortune  with  the  scientists  who  love 

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truth  whether  it  pays  or  not,  rather  than  with  those  religionists 
who  preach  a  Christianity  which  is  of  value  because  in  this  world 
its  hard  cash  dividends  are  regularly  paid. 

Our  modern  preachers  need,  above  all  else,  to  understand  this 
central  and  distinguishing  quality  of  the  scientific  mind.  We  are 
troubled,  to-day,  by  the  absence  of  the  educated  man  and 
woman  from  our  churches.  We  attribute  their  absence  to  the  “un¬ 
settling”  atmosphere  of  the  modern  college,  its  general  agnosticism 
and  its  persistent  brushing  the  bloom  off  the  credulity  of  youth. 
But  what  intellectual  welcome  does  the  mind  of  the  youth  of 
to-day  find  in  a  church  which  approaches  the  tangled  problems  of 
modern  faith  and  conduct  with  a  timid  “Hush”?  Or  how  will  the 
young  man,  disciplined  by  four  years  in  laboratories  and  class¬ 
rooms  to  the  fearless  quest  after  the  love  of  truth  for  its  own  sake, 
feel  intellectually  and  morally  at  home  in  a  church  busy  with  the 
sorry  task  of  trying  to  prove  that  Christianity  is  of  no  value  in 
itself,  but  only  as  it  makes  us  long  lived,  healthy  and  prosperous? 
Such  a  man  has  grown  up  in  an  intellectual  world  where  men  are 
not  interested  in  whether  truth  pays  or  not,  they  are  interested 
only  in  whether  the  thing  is  true.  If  it  be  true,  the  question  of  its 
costs  and  compensations  must  be  reckoned  with  later. 

Our  theological  seminaries  would  be  wisely  advised  if  they 
prescribed  as  a  requirement  for  graduation  a  course,  not  in  the 
general  results  of  modern  science  as  they  bear  upon  religion,  but 
in  the  central  temper  and  quality  of  the  scientific  mind.  They 
would  require  the  candidate  for  a  theological  degree  to  read  the 
lives  of  Darwin  and  Huxley,  that  he  might  understand  wherein 
lies  the  profoundly  religious  quality  of  such  characters. 

In  the  ’60s,  for  example,  there  passed  back  and  forth  between 
Thomas  Huxley  and  Charles  Kingsley  a  series  of  intimate  letters 
which  for  moral  interest  and  essential  nobility  are  almost  un¬ 
equaled  in  the  last  century.  At  one  point  in  these  letters  Huxley 
says: 

“Science  seems  to  me  to  teach  in  the  highest  and  strongest 
manner  the  great  truth  which  is  embodied  in  the  Christian  con- 
ception  of  entire  surrender  to  the  will  of  God.  Sit  down  before 
facts  as  a  little  child,  be  prepared  to  give  up  every  preconceived 
notion,  follow  humbly  wherever  and  to  whatever  abysses  nature 
leads  or  you  shall  learn  nothing.  I  have  only  begun  to  learn 

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THE  DISCIPLINES  OF  LIBERTY 

content  and  peace  of  mind  since  I  have  resolved  at  all  risks  to 
do  this.” 

Huxley  was  not  an  idolater  of  fact,  a  worshiper  of  the  bony  and 
barren  item  of  information,  he  was  a  lover  of  the  truth.  When  he 
went  to  Aberdeen  to  begin  his  duties  as  Rector  of  the  University 
there,  he  spoke  in  his  inaugural  of  the  university  as  a  place  where 
the  student  breathed  as  his  native  air  “a  passion  for  veracity.” 
This  “fanaticism  of  veracity,”  as  he  elsewhere  called  it,  was  the 
central  motive  of  Huxley’s  character.  No  man  who  is  fanatically 
passionate  in  his  devotion  to  truth  is  or  can  be  called  an  irre¬ 
ligious  man.  The  realm  of  truth  where  his  mind  moves  may  not  be 
that  which  in  other  days  was  described  as  “sacred.”  But  only  a 
provincial  mind  dares  to  divide  truth  into  sacred  and  secular. 
God  is  Truth  and  the  Truth  in  every  realm  of  human  concern  is 
God. 

So  again,  the  author  of  the  “Theologia  Germanica”  would  have 
found  a  kindred  spirit  in  Charles  Darwin.  Not  merely  was  there 
in  Darwin  that  same  humility  and  selflessness  which  were  in  the 
old  German  mystic  of  long  ago,  but  no  life  of  the  nineteenth 
century  came  nearer  to  being  unmercenary  at  its  heart.  In  the 
little  autobiographical  memoir  which  precedes  the  biography 
proper,  Darwin  tells  us  of  himself  that  his  success  as  a  scientist 
rested  upon  a  single  trait  of  mind. 

“I  had,  during  many  years,  followed  a  golden  rule,  namely, 
that  whenever  a  published  fact,  a  new  observation  or  thought 
came  across  me,  which  was  opposed  to  my  general  results,  to  make 
a  memorandum  of  it  without  fail  and  at  once;  for  I  had  found 
by  experience  that  such  facts  and  thoughts  were  far  more  apt  to 
escape  from  the  memory  than  favorable  ones.  Owing  to  this  habit, 
very  few  objections  were  raised  against  my  views  which  I  had 
not  at  least  noticed  and  attempted  to  answer.  ...  As  far  as  I 
can  judge,  I  am  not  apt  to  follow  blindly  the  lead  of  other  men. 
I  have  steadily  endeavored  to  keep  my  mind  free  so  as  to  give  up 
any  hypothesis,  however  much  beloved,  as  soon  as  facts  are  shown 
to  be  opposed  to  it.” 

How  often  does  one  meet  in  the  modern  preacher  these  out¬ 
standing  qualities  of  the  scientific  mind?  The  sorry  heritage  of 
the  traditional  “apologetic”  temper  of  the  pulpit  makes  most 
preachers  mere  eclectic  observers  of  fact  and  incident,  gathering 

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SCIENTIFIC  METHOD  AND  RELIGION 


together  out  of  the  vast  chaos  of  things  so  much  as  tells  in  behalf 
of  the  Christian  scheme,  but  without  the  austere  fearlessness  and 
candor  of  the  scientific  mind.  His  scientific  hypotheses  were  as 
dear  to  Charles  Darwin  as  are  the  creeds  to  the  churches.  It  cost 
Darwin  as  much  courage  and  inner  pain  to  abandon  his  beloved 
theory  in  the  realm  of  natural  law  as  it  costs  the  religionist  to 
give  up  some  cherished  article  of  the  faith.  Yet  the  willingness  to 
do  this  thing,  to  go  wherever  and  to  whatever  abysses  truth  leads, 
and  at  whatever  cost,  is  the  essence  of  the  profoundly  religious 
quality  of  the  scientific  mind. 

Professor  Ralph  Barton  Perry  in  his  “Present  Conflict  of  Ideas” 
returns  again  and  again  to  this  characteristic  of  the  scientific 
mind,  its  disinterestedness. 

“Scientific  method  has  come,  therefore,  to  signify  a  respect  for 
facts,  in  the  sense  of  that  which  is  independent  of  all  human 
wishes.  It  has  come  to  signify  a  conforming  of  judgment  to  things 
as  they  are,  regardless  of  likes  and  dislikes,  hopes  or  fears.  .  .  . 
The  true  scientist  will  be  simple  and  hardy  in  mind.  He  will  keep 
his  love  of  truth  purged  of  every  ulterior  motive.  This  he  will 
do  not  from  frivolity  or  obstinacy,  but  in  order  to  render  his  mind 
a  perfect  instrument  and  medium  of  truth.” 

If  there  be  such  a  thing  as  a  scientific  system  of  philosophy, 
that  system  must  be  characterized  by  this  initial  detachment  and 
indifference  to  the  immediate  pragmatic  test.  Bertrand  Russell 
admits  that  most  philosophies  are  more  interested  in  morality 
and  happiness  than  in  knowledge  for  its  own  sake.  “But  if  phi¬ 
losophy  is  to  attain  truth,  it  is  necessary  first  and  foremost  that 
philosophers  should  acquire  the  disinterested  intellectual  curiosity 
which  characterizes  the  genuine  man  of  science.”  . 

The  contrast  between  the  disinterested  and  the  interested 
search  for  truth  is  not,  however,  an  ultimate  and  absolute  one. 
Most  of  the  immediate  misunderstanding  between  the  two  points 
of  view  rests  upon  too  short  views  of  the  nature  of  truth.  The 
practical  temper  is  certainly  right  in  looking  with  suspicion  and 
impatience  upon  truth  as  the  sole  prerogative  and  private  monop¬ 
oly  of  a  mere  detached  and  disinterested  curiosity.  The  pedantic 
type  of  mind  rightly  irks  the  earnest  and  active  nature. 

But  the  quest  for  a  truth  which  may  be  applied  effectively  to 
life  must  be  undertaken  in  full  recognition  of  the  initial  paradox 

127 


THE  DISCIPLINES  OF  LIBERTY 


that  the  supposed  truth,  which  is  sought  merely  that  it  may  be 
accommodated  to  the  immediate  need  or  opportunity,  usually 
turns  out  to  be  a  half  truth  if  not  a  falsehood,  while  the  truth, 
which  is  permanently  and  fruitfully  effective  in  life,  more  often 
than  otherwise  comes  as  an  entirely  uncorrelated  idea  into  imme¬ 
diate  experience.  If  you  are  seeking  primarily  for  something  that 
will  work,  what  you  find  is  usually  not  the  truth  in  the  largest 
sense.  And  if  you  are  seeking  the  truth  you  may  discover  for  the 
moment  something  which  may  not  be  “workable”  but  which  yields 
its  measure  of  meaning  and  human  worth  only  in  due  time. 

The  fundamental  laws  of  energy  and  of  the  combination  of 
forces,  which  have  now  been  turned  to  daily  account  in  modern 
civilization  in  the  terms  of  the  telephone,  the  wireless,  the  gaso¬ 
lene  motor,  the  aeroplane,  all  passed  through  their  “three  years  in 
the  desert  of  Arabia.”  There  is,  for  example,  no  spot  so  detached 
from  the  world  of  immediate  concern  as  the  research  laboratory 
of  some  great  industry.  Here  are  men,  like  the  poet  “living  de¬ 
tached  days,”  who  are  neither  operatives  nor  managers  nor  sales¬ 
men.  They  are  simply  set  apart  as  a  kind  of  priestly  order  in 
modern  industry  to  go  on  the  quest  of  truth  for  its  own  sake.  It 
is  a  recognized  fact  that  every  pertinent  truth  of  science  may 
ultimately  be  brought  to  bear  upon  the  processes  of  any  given 
industry,  but  for  the  moment  there  is  little  or  no  relation  between 
the  investigations  of  the  research  worker  in  the  laboratory  and  the 
task  of  the  hand  in  the  factory.  The  great  industries,  which  live 
this  dual  life,  have  sensed  the  paradox  which  lies  at  the  center  of 
all  important  applied  knowledge,  that  the  only  way  to  discover  a 
truth  which  has  ultimate  applicability  to  life  is  to  ignore  the 
application  for  the  moment  and  to  seek  the  truth  for  its  own  sake. 

Now  something  of  this  same  sort  inheres  in  the  theory  of  the 
prophet’s  chamber  in  religion.  “Let  us  make  a  little  chamber  on 
the  wall,”  said  the  woman  of  Shunem  to  her  husband,  “and  let  us 
set  for  him  there  a  bed,  and  a  table,  and  a  stool,  and  a  candle¬ 
stick.”  That  prophet’s  chamber  was  a  luxury  then,  as  it  is  now. 
It  seems  to  involve  a  certain  economic  waste.  It  does  nothing  to 
justify  its  existence  much  of  the  time,  save  to  keep  open  house 
for  the  great  prophetic  idea.  A  parsimonious  and  pragmatic  criti¬ 
cism  would  suggest  that  religion  ought  to  let  that  empty  chamber 
to  some  paying  guest  of  the  mind.  But,  as  a  matter  of  actual  his- 

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SCIENTIFIC  METHOD  AND  RELIGION 


tory,  every  noble  religious  enthusiasm  and  every  revivifying 
spiritual  energy  enters  human  life  and  human  society  by  way  of 
this  prophet’s  chamber.  The  day  came  when  the  woman  of  Shunem 
had  cause  to  be  devoutly  thankful  for  the  disinterested  hospitality 
which  had  prompted  the  building  of  that  little  chamber  on  the 
wall  for  Elisha.  She  discovered,  in  due  season,  the  practical  ad¬ 
vantages  of  keeping  open  house  for  a  wandering  prophet.  But  that 
was  no  part  of  the  initial  impulse.  And  such  is  the  paradox  of  the 
spiritual  life,  that  only  the  single  eye  permanently  justifies  itself 
in  the  matured  event. 

It  is  at  precisely  this  point  that  modern  Christianity  has  failed 
and  is  failing  most  patently.  A  well-known  fellow  of  an  Oxford 
College  and  Canon  of  the  Church  of  England  can  write: 

“I  may  have  been  unfortunate,  but  it  is  certainly  the  fact  that 
I  have  never  heard  a  single  sermon  devoted  to  emphasizing  the 
all-important  fact  that  the  love  of  truth  is  a  fundamental  element 
in  the  love  of  God.  To  love  God  is  to  hate  delusion  and  to  long 
to  know  that  which  really  is.  The  love  of  truth  is  perhaps  that 
aspect  of  the  love  of  God  which  is  the  most  completely  disinter¬ 
ested.  ‘The  philosopher,’  says  Samuel  Butler,  ‘must  be  one  who 
has  left  all,  even  Christ  Himself,  for  Christ’s  sake!’  But  while  the 
world — or  rather  its  best  men — have  been  seeking  the  truth,  the 
Church  has  been  interested  in  defending  tradition,  with  the  result 
that  the  intellectual  leadership,  which  in  the  Middle  Ages  belonged 
to  the  Church,  has  passed  to  the  scientist.” 

Just  as  our  philosophy  is  too  often  a  method  of  attempting  to 
find  rational  justification  for  opinions  to  which  we  are  wedded 
for  irrational,  sentimental  and  temperamental  reasons,  so  our 
theologies  are  too  often  attempts  to  find  a  religious  justification 
for  hopes  and  purposes  which  rest  on  entirely  irreligious  premises. 
Prussia  dragoons  the  court  preacher  to  lend  the  sanction  of  reli¬ 
gion  to  her  temporal  ambitions  and  then  calls  the  resultant  a  Holy 
War,  a  Christian  Jehad.  But  no  one  confuses  the  two.  Against  this 
whole  temper  the  truly  scientific  spirit  inveighs.  The  true  scientist 
may  not  have  a  weather  eye  to  profit  and  loss  in  history.  He 
cannot  prostitute  Truth,  making  of  her  the  kept  woman  of  his 
worldly  ambitions.  If  he  is  to  win  her  devotion  he  must  bring  to 
her  an  intellectual  chastity  unsullied  by  ulterior  motive. 

129 


THE  DISCIPLINES  OF  LIBERTY 


“Friend,  whereto  art  thou  come?”  Thus  Verity; 

Of  each  that  to  the  world’s  sad  Olivet 
Comes  with  no  multitude,  but  alone  by  night, 

Lit  with  the  one  torch  of  his  lifted  soul, 

Seeking  her  that  he  may  lay  hands  on  her; 

Thus:  and  waits  answer  from  the  mouth  of  deed. 

Truth  is  a  maid,  whom  men  woo  diversely; 

But  woe  to  him  that  takes  the  immortal  kiss 
And  not  estates  her  in  his  housing  life, 

Mother  of  all  his  seed!  So  he  betrays, 

Not  Truth  the  unbetrayable,  but  himself; 

And  with  his  kiss’  rated  traitor-craft 
The  Halcedema  of  a  plot  of  days 
He  buys,  to  consummate  his  Judasry 
Therein  with  Judas’  guerdon  of  despair. 

This  is  not  merely  good  poetry.  It  is  the  point  at  which  Francis 
Thompson  unconsciously  enters  the  Holy  of  Holies  in  the  scientific 
temper  of  the  present  time. 

It  is  little  wonder  that  a  mind  so  disciplined  to  constant  acts  of 
intellectual  asceticism  and  renunciation,  so  utterly  devoted  to 
truth  for  its  own  sake,  finds  itself  in  a  morally  alien  environment 
when  it  enters  churches  where  Christianity  is  preached  not  as  a 
pearl  of  great  price  in  and  for  itself,  but  merely  as  a  convenient 
and  reliable  means  for  realizing  those  temporal  ends  after  which 
the  Gentiles  seek.  There  is  little  or  no  doubt  that  the  mind  of 
Christ  finds  a  more  congenial  environment  in  the  studio  where 
beauty  is  loved  for  its  own  sake  and  not  because  it  pays,  on  the 
ship’s  bridge  in  a  gale  where  duty  is  loved  for  its  own  sake  and 
not  because  it  pays,  in  the  science  laboratory  where  truth  is  loved 
for  its  own  sake  and  not  because  it  pays,  than  in  the  average 
modern  church  where  the  preacher  is  busy  with  the  sorry  argu¬ 
ment  ad  hominem  in  behalf  of  a  Christianity  commended  to  moral 
investors  because  it  offers  large  material  returns  on  the  spiritual 
venture.  A  well  known  American  doctor  who  is  a  product  and  in¬ 
carnation  of  the  modern  scientific  spirit  put  his  finger  on  a  sore 
spot  in  contemporary  religion  when  he  said  to  his  minister:  “The 
trouble  with  your  profession  is  that  it  is  not  as  honest  as  mine. 
You  are  not  trained,  as  we  are,  to  seek  the  facts  fearlessly  and  to 
dare  to  face  the  truth  no  matter  what  its  consequences.” 

There  is  no  single  sign  of  the  times  so  disquieting  as  the  con¬ 
stant  appeal  in  behalf  of  religion  to  the  mercenary  spirit.  Great 

130 


SCIENTIFIC  METHOD  AND  RELIGION 


Protestant  denominations  in  the  desire  to  swell  their  exchequers 
have  not  hesitated  in  the  last  five  years  to  commend  their  wares 
to  the  modern  business  man  on  the  basis  that  the  Church  is  a 
paying  investment.  Our  daily  papers  and  monthly  magazines  have 
flaunted  before  our  time  such  arguments  as  this:  Modern  business 
rests  upon  credit,  credit  is  impossible  without  honest  men,  the 
churches  are  engaged  in  the  business  of  making  honest  men,  there¬ 
fore,  Mr.  Business  Man,  if  you  wish  your  business  to  prosper,  you 
can  well  afford  to  make  us  a  generous  gift  and  charge  it  up  to  your 
sinking  fund.  Our  denominational  papers,  interested  in  helping  to 
raise  millions  for  clergy  pension  funds,  have  preached  the  same 
shabby  gospel;  modern  business  depends  upon  law  and  order, 
churches  make  for  law  and  order,  ministers  run  churches,  there¬ 
fore,  Mr.  Business  Man,  you  ought  to  support  the  clergy. 
Modern  missions,  originally  the  most  selfless  venture  of  the 
church,  is  always  on  the  verge  of  stating  its  case  on  the  purely 
business  basis ;  missionaries  go  to  backward  races,  they  carry  with 
them  the  furniture  of  western  civilization,  they  unconsciously 
create  a  demand  for  this  furniture  in  the  economically  and  in¬ 
dustrially  benighted  parts  of  the  world,  they  are  advance  agents 
of  sewing-machines,  ploughs,  tractors  and  threshing-machines, 
automobiles  and  telephones,  therefore  any  far-seeing  corporation 
will  subscribe  to  foreign  missions  and  charge  the  subscription  off  to 
advance  publicity. 

The  spread  of  this  temper  will  be  the  moral  ruin  of  the  churches. 
If  it  persists  it  will  drive  out  of  the  ministry  every  self-respecting 
preacher,  and  will  effectively  stop  the  thin  stream  of  prophetic 
souls  still  flowing  into  that  holy  office.  For  no  man  of  moral  free¬ 
dom  and  passion  will  be  content  to  ally  himself  permanently  with 
an  institution  whose  main  function  in  history  and  society  is  but¬ 
tressing  up  “law  and  order,”  when  those  words  mean  the  existing 
prerogative  of  vested  interests.  Nor  will  such  a  man  consent  to 
enter  an  office  which  is  commonly  regarded  as  a  mere  private 
chaplaincy  to  big  business.  The  tacit,  constant  suggestion  of  this 
whole  sorry  logic,  that  the  main  end  of  human  history  and  the 
final  goal  of  human  society  is  a  ten  per  cent  dividend  with  an 
occasional  “melon”  thrown  in,  is  simply  so  far  outside  the  con¬ 
ception  of  human  ends  contemplated  by  the  gospel  of  Jesus  that 
it  has  no  possible  claim  to  the  designation  “Christian.” 

I3I 


THE  DISCIPLINES  OF  LIBERTY 

The  artists  know  this,  the  men  who  honor  duty  for  its  own  sake 
know  it  though  they  cannot  state  it.  And  above  all,  the  scientist 
knows  it.  His  whole  life  and  discipline  cut  in  the  other  direction. 
A  century  of  devoted  and  consecrated  inquiry  has  taught  him  that 
truth  cannot  be  sought  and  found  by  those  who  have  an  advance 
prudential  eye  to  the  market  price  of  knowledge.  What  measure  of 
truth  modern  science  has  won  for  us  has  been  gained  by  hardening 
the  heart  and  resolutely  closing  the  mind  against  the  insidious 
seduction  of  the  gospel  of  temporal  rewards.  The  scientific  spirit 
dominates  all  the  nobler  intellectual  effort  of  our  time.  If  thinking 
men  and  women  find  it  hard  to  stop  in  churches  which  live  at  a 
moral  level  lower  than  the  austere  altitude  at  which  science  at  its 
best  always  moves,  then  the  churches  have  no  redress  and  should 
have  none.  The  church  which  has  one  eye  squinted  toward  Mam¬ 
mon  will  never  have  that  vision  of  God  which  is  our  eternal  life. 
If  the  Church  cannot  shake  itself  free  of  the  worldly-minded  stand¬ 
ards  of  much  of  modern  business,  then  its  work  is  as  good  as  done, 
and  the  sacred  trust  of  the  unmercenary  love  of  God  will  pass  to 
the  artists,  to  the  truly  moral  lovers  of  the  day’s  humble  duty, 
and  above  all  to  those  noble  minds  disciplined  by  modern  science 
in  the  unmercenary  love  of  Truth.  For  these  souls,  living  their 
deeper  life  in  their  several  forms  of  the  selfless  love  of  God,  stand 
in  the  spiritual  succession  of  the  saints,  apostles,  prophets,  martyrs. 

For  this  cause  I  prayed,  and  understanding  was  given  me: 

I  called  upon  God  and  there  came  to  me  a  spirit  of  wisdom. 

I  preferred  her  before  scepters  and  thrones, 

And  riches  I  esteemed  nothing  in  comparison  of  her. 

Neither  did  I  liken  to  her  any  priceless  gem, 

Because  all  the  gold  of  the  earth  in  her  presence  is  as  a  little  sand, 

And  silver  shall  be  accounted  as  clay  before  her. 

Above  health  and  comeliness  I  loved  her, 

And  I  chose  to  have  her  rather  than  light, 

Because  her  bright  shining  is  never  laid  to  sleep. 

But  with  her  there  came  to  me  all  good  things  together. 

For  there  is  in  her  a  spirit  quick  of  understanding,  holy, 

Alone  in  kind,  manifold, 

Subtil,  freely  moving, 

Clear  in  utterance,  unpolluted, 

Distinct,  unharmed, 

Loving  what  is  good,  keen,  unhindered, 

132 


SCIENTIFIC  METHOD  AND  RELIGION 


Beneficent,  loving  toward  man, 

Steadfast,  sure,  free  from  care, 

All  powerful,  all  surveying, 

And  penetrating  through  all  spirits 

That  are  quick  of  understanding,  pure,  most  subtil : 

For  wisdom  is  more  mobile  than  any  motion; 

Yea  she  pervadeth  and  penetrateth  all  things  by  reason  of  her  pureness. 
For  she  is  a  breath  of  the  power  of  God, 

And  a  clear  effulgence  of  the  glory  of  the  Almighty ; 

Therefore  can  nothing  defiled  find  entrance  into  her, 

For  she  is  an  effulgence  from  everlasting  light, 

And  an  unspotted  mirror  of  the  working  of  God, 

And  an  image  of  his  goodness. 

And  she,  being  one,  hath  power  to  do  all  things; 

And  remaining  in  herself,  reneweth  all  things: 

And  from  generation  to  generation  passing  into  holy  souls 
She  maketh  men  friends  of  God  and  prophets. 

For  nothing  doth  God  love  save  him  that  dwelleth  with  wisdom* 

*  “The  Wisdom  of  Solomon,”  Ch.  vii. 


133 


CHAPTER  VIII. 


The  Liberty  of  the  Parish  Minister. 


O  get  on  to  that  hackneyed  subject,  “The  Collapse  of 
the  Church.”  Obviously  the  Church  is  as  good  as  dead 
and  there  remains  little  more  to  be  done  aside  from  the 
decent  obsequies.  There  is,  for  the  passing  Church,  the  mitigating 
comfort  to  be  derived  from  the  prediction  that  the  mortality  among 
all  other  ancient  and  venerated  institutions  will  be  high  in  the  near 
future.  Her  going  is  so  timed  that  she  can  point  the  way  for  a  very 
respectable  company  of  followers,  the  home,  the  state,  the  college 
and  other  outworn  cumberers  of  the  ground,  which  have  been 
stricken  down  by  the  epidemic  of  “collapse,”  and  have  nothing 
more  to  ask  of  this  world  than  the  opportunity  for  decent 
euthanasia. 

Meanwhile,  “Who  would  have  thought  the  old  man  had  so 
much  blood  in  him?”  The  Church  is  patently  passing  away  from 
an  incurable  and  pernicious  anaemia.  But  since  this  is  a  lingering 
death,  any  number  of  humane  practitioners  are  ready  to  shorten 
the  agony  by  opening  for  good  and  all  some  convenient  artery 
that  invites  the  scalpel  of  wholesale  condemnation.  Even  so,  the 
Church  lingers.  Like  Browning’s  martyr  at  the  stake,  the  collaps¬ 
ing  Church  of  the  present  time  at  least  has  voice  enough  to  affirm, 
“I  was  some  time  a-dying.” 

As  a  matter  of  plain,  ecclesiastical  history,  there  never  was  a 
time  when  the  Church  was  not  in  collapse.  The  spiritual  specialists 
have  always  agreed  in  their  diagnosis.  This  universal  verdict  may 
have  induced  a  certain  constitutional  hollow-chestedness  on  the 
part  of  the  institution  which  has  now  become  habitual,  and  may 
easily  be  mistaken  for  an  acute,  rather  than  a  chronic  condition. 
For  when  the  doctors  all  agree  that  the  patient  is  suffering  a  com¬ 
plete  breakdown,  he  must  have  more  than  a  superhuman  self- 
confidence  if  his  own  posture  does  not  reflect  the  consensus  of 

134 


THE  PARISH  MINISTER 

expert  opinion.  He  is  convinced  that  they  are  right,  and  yet  he 
surprises  himself  and  the  wise  men  by  hanging  on  when,  from  all 
the  signs,  he  should  be  dead  and  buried.  He  realizes  that  he  is  a 
physiological  monstrosity  and  a  medical  scandal,  but  he  cannot 
help  himself.  He  even  finds  a  certain  perverse  satisfaction  in  his 
innate  vitality  which  cannot  be  measured  by  the  book.  The  Church 
has  always  had  to  live,  and  indeed  has  succeeded  in  living  for 
some  hundreds  of  years,  in  the  face  of  the  combined  and  uniform 
judgment  of  the  specialists  that,  from  all  the  symptoms,  she  should 
be  in  her  grave. 

It  is  generally  understood  that  the  churches  are  practically 
empty.  No  one  any  longer  tries  to  pretend  otherwise.  It  avails 
nothing  that  many  city  churches  are  still  crowded  every  Sunday, 
that  many  more  are  half  full,  and  that  most  of  them  muster  their 
handful  of  worshipers.  Patently,  this  is  the  last  flicker  before  the 
end.  And  what  are  these  among  so  many?  The  time  was  when 
Jonathan  and  his  armor  bearer  scaled  the  rocks  Bozez  and  Seneh, 
to  attack  the  Philistine  single-handed,  because,  in  those  days,  there 
was  “no  restraint  to  the  Lord  to  save  by  many.”  But  modern 
scholarship  can  dispose  of  that  archaic  temper,  since  the  God  of 
Democracy  never  does  anything  without  first  counting  noses.  In 
the  old  days  it  was  considered  dangerous  procedure  to  number  the 
host.  But  to-day  statistics  are  the  handmaiden  of  piety,  and  the 
figures  are  against  the  Church. 

Yet  empty  churches  do  not  seem  to  be  solely  a  modern  phe¬ 
nomenon.  Nearly  a  hundred  years  ago  Wordsworth  lamented 
“The  Decay  of  Piety”: 

Oft  have  I  seen,  ere  Time  had  ploughed  my  cheek, 

Matrons  and  sires — who,  punctual  to  the  call 

Of  their  loved  Church,  on  fast  or  festival 

Through  the  long  year  the  house  of  prayer  would  seek; 

By  Christmas  snows,  by  visitation  bleak 
Of  Easter  wind  unscared,  from  hut  or  hall 
They  came  to  lowly  bench  or  sculptured  stall, 

But  with  one  fervor  of  devotion  meek. 

I  see  the  places  where  they  once  were  known, 

And  ask  .  .  . 

Is  Ancient  Piety  forever  flown? 

That  was  in  1827.  As  Francis  Thompson  says  of  nineteenth- 
century  England,  “The  east  wind  has  replaced  the  discipline.” 

135 


THE  DISCIPLINES  OF  LIBERTY 


But  at  least  things  are  no  worse  now  than  they  were  in  Words¬ 
worth’s  time,  and  a  hundred  years  of  snow,  hail  and  stormy 
vapor  have  not  entirely  dissipated  “the  great  congregation.” 

Altogether,  the  reputedly  empty  meeting-houses  have  been  able 
to  gather  enough  witnesses  to  embarrass  the  case  for  the  prosecu¬ 
tion,  and  the  suit  of  Society  vs.  the  Church  drags  on  in  the  court 
of  common  opinion.  After  all,  the  major  institutions  of  human 
society  are  not  so  collapsible  as  they  appear  to  be.  They  were  not 
fabricated  wholesale  for  emergencies.  They  were  put  together  by 
patient  hand  labor.  And  they  betray,  when  their  framework  is 
investigated,  the  cunning  of  the  human  artificer  at  his  best.  They 
have  gone  up,  like  Solomon’s  temple,  without  noise  in  their  build¬ 
ing.  And  he  who  takes  the  social  contract  for  wrecking  them  would 
do  well  to  allow  himself  a  little  margin  of  time  beyond  his  expecta¬ 
tion  of  completing  the  job. 

Certain  of  the  Oxford  colleges  are  built  of  a  very  soft  limestone, 
dug  from  hard  by,  which  weathers  rapidly.  After  an  odd  century 
or  two  at  the  mercy  of  the  raw  air  of  the  upper  Thames  valley, 
the  fabric  of  these  colleges  looks  to  be  in  a  state  of  imminent  col¬ 
lapse.  Two  American  women,  wandering  around  Oxford  not  long 
since,  ventured  into  one  of  these  shabby  sepulchers  of  “lost 
causes,”  pushed  their  unabashed  way  up  a  stair  in  the  back 
quad,  and  opened  a  door.  They  saw  before  them  a  much  alive  and 
entirely  contemporary-looking  boy,  sprawled  out  in  his  basket 
chair  before  a  cheerful  fire,  filling  the  room  with  pipe  smoke  and 
his  brains  with  the  Nicomachean  Ethics.  “We  beg  your  pardon, 
we  didn’t  know  that  these  ruins  were  inhabited.”  For  the  benefit 
of  those  emancipated  investigators  who  look  upon  the  Church  as 
the  home  of  a  lost  cause,  it  is  worth  while  merely  to  say  that  the 
ruins  are  still  inhabited. 

There  is,  however,  one  distinctively  modern  aspect  of  the 
situation,  altogether  apart  from  the  perennial  Decay  of  Piety, 
which  is  in  a  fair  way  to  depopulate  the  ruins  for  good  and  all. 
This  particular  aspect  of  the  many-sided  “Problem  of  the  Church” 
bears  the  mark  of  our  own  time,  has  already  become  a  sore  daily 
perplexity  to  the  ministry,  and  is  fast  becoming  a  conscious  griev¬ 
ance  on  the  part  of  the  congregation. 

Let  us  approach  the  problem  by  way  of  illustration.  There  was 
once  upon  a  time  a  very  romantic  institution  known  as  the  Chris- 

136 


THE  PARISH  MINISTER 


tian  Year.  This  arrangement  of  the  calendar,  arbitrary,  artificial, 
perhaps,  but  always  suggestive,  was  devised  to  express  a  certain 
cyclic  tendency  in  human  nature,  the  desire  to  get  back  or  come 
round  again  to  some  of  the  major  items  of  thought  and  conduct. 
There  was  Ember  Day — what  a  romantic  name! — and  Maundy 
Thursday — what  an  intriguing  title!  There  were  Innocents’  Day 
and  All  Souls’  Day.  There  were  Advent  and  Holy  Week  and  Whit¬ 
sunday. 

But  this  scheme  of  things  has  long  since  been  superseded  by 
another  Christian  Year,  which  every  minister  has  come  to  recog¬ 
nize.  He  sits  down  at  his  desk  on  Monday  morning  to  try  to  re¬ 
cover  a  little  of  the  lost  grace  of  “recollection.”  Next  Sunday  is 
Epiphany,  so  much  is  clear  in  the  near  future.  “Recollected”  to 
this  tentative  degree,  he  begins  opening  his  morning  mail.  From 
an  important-looking  envelope  he  takes  out  a  legal-sized  docu¬ 
ment,  an  impressive  piece  of  printer’s  art.  (Mental  note:  That 
would  be  good  paper  for  my  church  calendar  if  we  could  afford 
it — watermark  shows  “Capitalist  Bond,  Heavy  Deckle.”  But  we 
can’t  afford  printing  like  that!)  The  document  announces  that 
next  Sunday  has  been  appointed  to  be  observed  in  all  the  churches 
as  Nation-Wide  Anti-Trichinosis  Sunday.  The  secretary  of  some 
department  in  Washington  lends  his  sanction.  A  Minor  Canon 
adds  that  the  opportunity  of  the  Church  is  plain.  Inside  the  folder 
are  pictures.  Item:  one  trichina,  very  lifelike  and  sinister.  Item: 
victim  of  trichinosis,  obvious  ennui.  Item:  our  agent  in  Lone 
Ridge,  Ford  car  and  infected  hogs  in  background.  Item:  cured 
patient,  alert  and  aggressive.  The  last  page  announces  that  parcel 
post  will  bring  cards  allowing  members  of  the  congregation  to  en¬ 
list  in  the  great  modern  crusade:  annual  dues,  $i;  sustaining 
membership,  $25;  life  membership,  $100.  It  is  confidently  an¬ 
ticipated  that  at  least  two  or  three  of  the  congregation  will  join 
as  life  members,  and  that  there  will  be  a  very  general  response  to 
the  appeal  for  annual  dues.  Cards  are  to  be  returned  to — and  so 
forth.  There  often  follows  an  appropriate  Bible  text,  counseling 
sacrifice,  as  a  last  succulent  morsel  of  bait  for  the  ecclesiastical 
mind. 

The  minister,  whose  business  it  is  not  to  ignore  any  means  by 
which  mankind  may  be  bettered,  begins  to  see  that  Epiphany  is 
after  all  an  anachronism,  that  the  great  modern  world  has  got 

137 


THE  DISCIPLINES  OF  LIBERTY 


beyond  that.  Trichinae  have  the  obvious  advantage  of  contem¬ 
poraneity.  Trichina  it  shall  be.  The  plot  thickens,  however,  as  the 
opening  of  the  mail  goes  on.  Five  letters  farther  is  a  statement 
that  next  Sunday  has  been  appointed  to  be  observed  by  all  the 
churches  in  behalf  of  the  Relief  of  the  War-Devastated  Districts 
of  Upper  Senegambia.  Very  prominent  names  in  the  business  and 
ecclesiastical  world  appear  on  this  letterhead:  well  known  bankers 
and  prominent  churchmen,  with  a  smattering  of  the  humaner 
radicals.  More  pictures  of  atrocities  and  plague  victims.  Obviously 
the  need  in  Senegambia  is  as  great  as  in  Lone  Ridge.  The  minister 
wishes  to  think  internationally,  and  now  leans  to  the  war  victims, 
to  avoid  the  charge  of  provincialism  by  concentrating  upon  the 
American  trichina.  Perhaps  it  could  be  shown  that  Upper  Sene¬ 
gambia  is  devastated  by  trichinae.  The  victims  in  both  cases  look 
rather  alike  in  the  pictures.  In  that  case  the  task  would  be  made 
simpler,  and  the  collection  could  be  equally  divided. 

But  there  seems  to  have  been  some  lack  of  “ cooperation”- — fine 
upstanding  modern  word,  that! — on  the  part  of  these  agencies. 
The  perplexed  minister  lets  his  problem  simmer  until  midweek, 
and  then  finally  decides  that  he  will  preach  a  regular  Epiphany 
Sermon  on  the  Manifestation  of  Jesus  to  the  Wise  Men  of  To¬ 
day.  He  does  this,  not  in  a  moment  of  petulance  or  distraction, 
but  discreetly  and  advisedly,  on  the  sober  conviction  that,  in  the 
long  run,  he  will  do  both  these  causes  more  practical  good  by 
trying  to  make  men  understand  the  Mind  of  Christ,  than  by  dis¬ 
cussing  the  causes,  symptoms  and  cure  of  trichinosis,  or  by 
getting  mired  in  the  political  misfortunes  of  Senegambia. 

His  punishment  tarrieth  not.  It  cometh  like  the  Assyrian.  These 
causes  keep  tab  on  him.  They  write  him  off  the  great  books  of  life 
which  they  keep  at  their  headquarters.  The  report  is  passed  on  to 
other  agencies  that  he  is  out  of  touch  with  modern  life,  that  he 
is  merely  an  impractical  dreamer  who  cannot  be  counted  on  to 
help  when  the  fighting  is  hard.  The  cause  went  up  to  do  battle  for 
the  Lord  and  he  stopped  in  Meroz.  He  has  his  taste  of  the  curse 
on  Meroz.  Various  members  of  his  own  parish,  who  are  specially 
interested  in  the  trichina  or  Senegambia  or  some  other  Holy  Day 
in  the  modern  Christian  Year,  begin  to  feel  that  rumor  is  true. 
Altogether  he  begins  to  realize  that  the  world  is  determined  to 

138 


THE  PARISH  MINISTER 

write  him  down  a  renegade,  and  to  adjust  himself  to  that 
situation. 

This  is  not  rhetoric.  It  is  hardly  satire.  It  is  merely  a  free  para¬ 
phrase  of  the  everlasting  problem  of  the  modern  minister.  The 
thing  had  gained  great  headway  and  vogue  before  the  war.  Even 
then,  the  laziest  minister  in  Christendom  did  not  have  to  stoop  to 
buy  his  sermons  ready  written  from  that  wholesale  homiletics 
factory  somewhere  out  West.  He  could  get  them  all  free  in  outline 
from  the  “causes.”  With  the  war  there  was  hardly  a  Sunday  when 
his  way  was  not  made  plain  before  him,  either  by  actual  officials 
or  by  civilian  philanthropies.  The  Draft,  the  Bond  Issues,  the 
Food  Conservation,  the  Welfare  Agencies — all  of  them  claimed  his 
instant  service,  week  by  week.  He  was  given  very  little  oppor¬ 
tunity  to  reflect  himself,  or  to  ask  others  to  reflect,  that  there  are 
certain  humane  and  catholic  aspects  of  the  character  of  Jesus 
which  in  history  have  somehow  outlasted  all  wars  and  rumors 
of  wars. 

He  was  somewhat  startled  to  find  that  the  great  world  of  affairs 
took  him  so  seriously.  Obviously,  what  he  said  still  had  some 
influence,  and  it  seemed  to  be  taken  for  granted  that  he  spoke  to 
more  men  and  women  than  the  “ruin  hypothesis”  implied.  But  he 
never  had  time  to  think  that  contradiction  through.  After  the  war 
his  denominations,  singly  or  collectively,  having  been  illuminated 
as  to  the  true  function  of  the  modern  minister,  descended  upon 
him  with  programs  for  millions  which,  ten  years  ago,  both  he  and 
they  would  have  thought  impossible.  His  leaders  were  certainly 
right  to  try  to  conserve  the  deeper  moral  lessons  of  the  war.  They 
were  right  as  to  the  need  of  the  world  and  the  opportunity  of  the 
Church.  But,  somehow,  in  the  process  he  found  himself  depersonal¬ 
ized.  He  had  ceased  to  be  a  prophet  and  a  pastor  and  had  become 
simply  a  middleman.  The  modern  world  of  organized  philan¬ 
thropy  and  ecclesiasticism  had  elected  him  salesman  for  its  count¬ 
less  causes.  All  he  had  to  do  was  to  follow  instructions.  The  thing 
culminated  in  the  spring  of  1920,  when  the  Interchurch  Move¬ 
ment  relieved  him  of  all  further  personal  responsibility  by  out¬ 
lining  his  whole  half  year  for  him.  He  was  to  pray  in  January, 
exhort  in  February,  convert  in  March  and  collect  in  April  and 
May.  Somehow,  he  broke  down  under  the  strain.  His  life  had 

r39 


THE  DISCIPLINES  OF  LIBERTY 


become  too  wooden.  And  he  has  been  thinking  his  whole  status 
over  once  again. 

He  has  had  time  for  a  little  sober  reflection  as  to  what  the  rest 
of  his  days  are  going  to  be  if  the  process  goes  on  indefinitely,  and 
he  yields  the  major  point  of  his  independence.  Obviously,  there 
will  be  no  need  for  men  to  go  to  theological  schools  in  the  future, 
if  this  is  what  the  Christian  ministry  is  to  become.  Young  men 
had  much  better  take  a  couple  of  correspondence  courses,  one  from 
the  man  with  the  magnetic  index  finger,  who  can  make  him  a  per¬ 
suasive  speaker,  the  other  from  some  brisk,  up-to-the-minute 
school  of  salesmanship. 

But  this  prospect  calls  for  a  revised  conception  of  the  ministry. 
And  its  compensations  are  not  those  which  he  has  associated  with 
his  past  liberty  of  prophesying  and  his  cure  of  souls.  He  sees  him¬ 
self  as  a  kind  of  permanent  beater  for  unending  drives.  He  it  is 
who,  week  by  week,  must  hound  the  now  attenuated  and  gun-shy 
giver  into  the  open,  where  the  causes  may  pot  away  with  both 
barrels  and  bag  their  budgets.  The  beater  has  none  of  the  sport. 
And  he  will  be  more  than  human  if  he  does  not  come  to  have  a 
certain  perverse  sympathy  for  the  flock  in  the  covert  assigned  to 
him.  At  least,  he  is  perfectly  clear  that  he  cannot  see  them  all 
killed  off  before  his  eyes,  but  must  allow  a  “righteous  remnant” 
to  survive  and  breed,  during  the  brief  season  closed  to  causes, — 
say  in  Lent, — against  next  season’s  need. 

Why  does  not  the  Average  Man  go  to  church?  Being  a  teacher 
in  a  theological  school  as  well  as  a  parish  minister,  I  sent  out 
spies  into  the  great  and  wicked  world  last  year  to  get  an  answer 
to  this  question.  Effectively  disguised  in  mufti,  they  approached 
the  Average  Man  and  asked  him  for  an  honest  answer.  They  came 
back  to  the  camp  and  reported  with  surprising  unanimity  that, 
among  other  things,  the  Average  Man  was  getting  tired  of  going 
to  church  to  worship  God  and  being  offered  the  trichina  and 
Senegambia  as  a  substitute.  One  Average  Man  said  quite  bluntly 
that  fourteen  Sundays  at  the  height  of  the  season  had  been  wholly 
taken  up  in  his  church  by  the  presentation  of  fourteen  different 
denominational  and  social  causes,  and  that  he  found  his  inclina¬ 
tion  to  go  to  church  suffering  a  sea  change.  Not  that  trichinosis 
and  Senegambia  were  “dead  hypotheses”  to  him.  He  took  an 
interest  in  these  and  all  other  similar  moral  opportunities.  But 

140 


THE  PARISH  MINISTER 


their  name  was  legion;  and  any  selection  of  them  for  the  purposes 
of  public  worship  was  arbitrary.  He  felt  as  if  the  parts  were 
getting  in  the  way  of  the  whole.  The  trouble  with  his  moral  and 
spiritual  life  was  just  that  he  could  not  see  the  wood  for  the  trees. 
And  the  Church,  so  far  from  giving  him  the  total  perspective  and 
helping  him  unify  his  life,  was  merely  adding  to  his  confusion  and 
distraction.  The  Average  Man  was  not  quite  certain  what  he 
wanted  when  he  went  to  church,  but  he  knew  it  was  something 
which  should  have  in  it  the  element  of  contrast.  He  wanted  a  sus;- 
gestion  of  the  everlasting  otherness  of  life  which  real  religion 
always  intimates.  He  believed  that  all  the  fine,  unselfish,  organized 
altruisms  which  abound  in  every  city  and  claim  the  support  of 
Church  people  were  aspects  of  twentieth-century  Christianity. 
He  did  not  understand  a  Christianity  which  was  so  far  removed 
from  this  world  that  it  called  these  activities  secular.  He  believed 
that  modern  religion  is  as  wide  as  every  honest  effort  to  help  the 
world.  But  he  was  getting  mired  in  detail.  He  was  losing  the 
power  to  say  “God”  in  connection  with  them  all. 

He  seemed  to  remember  something  to  the  same  effect  in  Saint 
Augustine’s  “Confessions.”  “What  do  I  love,  when  I  love  my 
God?”  asks  Augustine.  “I  questioned  the  earth,  and  it  said,  T  am 
not  He.’  I  questioned  the  sea  and  the  depths,  and  they  replied, 
‘We  are  not  thy  God;  seek  above  us.’  I  questioned  the  blowing 
winds,  and  the  whole  air  with  its  inhabitants  replied,  ‘Anaximenes 
is  wrong;  I  am  not  God.’  I  questioned  the  heavens,  sun,  moon, 
stars:  ‘Neither  are  we,’  say  they,  ‘the  God  whom  you  seek.’  ” 

All  these  were  aspects  of  God,  but  religion,  as  the  Average  Man 
saw  it,  was  just  the  power  to  say  “God”  where  the  rest  of  the 
world  said  Nature,  Justice,  Duty,  Peace,  Social  Service,  Foreign 
Missions.  And  it  seemed  to  him  as  he  reflected  upon  it,  that  the 
Church  was  missing  its  chance  to  help  him  say  that  thing.  He 
listened  in  the  shell  of  modern  being,  and  he  heard  the  roar  of 
the  sea  of  life,  with  its  manifold  activities.  What  he  missed  in 
the  method  and  temper  of  the  modem  Church  was  the  constant 
suggestion  of  a  “central  peace  subsisting  at  the  heart  of  endless 
agitation.” 

Now  the  parish  minister  has  a  religious  duty  toward  the  Average 
Man  in  his  own  town  quite  as  real  as  his  duty  toward  all  other 
men  in  far  lands.  As  things  are  now  organized,  the  ability  of  the 

141 


THE  DISCIPLINES  OF  LIBERTY 


Christian  Church  to  maintain  and  to  extend  its  whole  missionary 
and  philanthropic  program  comes  back  upon  the  fund  of  real  reli¬ 
gion  in  the  average  men  and  women  in  all  average  parishes.  The 
“friendly  citizen”  who  was  to  help  pay  the  bills  proved  to  be  a 
hypothesis,  et  praeterea  nihil!  The  parish  minister  does  not 
wish  to  encourage  the  Average  Man  in  a  selfish  and  inert  Chris¬ 
tianity,  particularly  in  a  day  of  great  need  and  opportunity.  But 
he  does  realize,  nevertheless,  that  it  is  possible  in  this  day  to 
preach  a  long-range  and  rather  impersonal  Christian  charity  which 
is  very  largely  a  thing  of  subscription  lists  and  check  books,  and 
which  brings  with  it  no  warmth  and  spiritual  reality  in  the  daily 
experience  of  this  average  parishioner.  His  first  duty  to  his  parish 
is  to  help  the  persons  who  comprise  it  to  do  their  inevitable  daily 
work  in  a  Christian  spirit.  If  he  fails  to  do  this  he  fails  his  people 
at  the  point  where  they  need  his  help  most  sorely.  And  if  he  fails 
to  cultivate  the  central  soul  of  his  people  he  mortgages,  at  the 
same  time,  those  margins  of  the  generous  Over-Soul  which  find 
ultimate  expression  in  the  causes.  In  short,  the  seed  of  the  mission¬ 
ary  enterprise  and  general  social  zeal  will  never  bear  its  hundred¬ 
fold  unless  it  falls  into  good  ground.  And  the  parish  minister  is 
primarily  the  keeper  and  cultivator  of  that  soil. 

The  parish  minister  of  to-day  claims,  therefore,  the  right  to 
interpret  his  relation  to  causes  philanthropic,  political,  industrial, 
denominational,  in  the  large.  He  sees  his  people  become  restive 
under  the  rapid  fire  of  drives  to  which  they  have  been  subjected 
in  the  years  immediately  past.  He  does  not  put  it  all  down  to 
their  lethargy  or  selfishness.  He  knows  them  better  than  that.  He 
knows  that  all  of  them  are  generous,  that  most  of  them  are  en¬ 
listed  in  the  regular  support  of  many  causes  which  have  come 
home  to  them  with  immediacy,  and  that  many  of  them  are  giving 
to  the  point  of  sacrifice  and  beyond.  But  leaving  finances  at  one 
side,  he  feels  the  peril  of  a  dwindling  congregation  as  the  result 
of  the  intrusion  of  all  this  machinery  into  the  foreground  of  their 
minds.  They  come  to  church  in  the  patient  and  often  dumb  hope 
that  they  may  find  bread  for  a  hunger  at  the  heart  of  them;  but, 
in  accordance  with  the  new  Christian  Year  and  the  pressure  of 
authority  or  popular  opinion,  he  has  to  offer  them  a  stone  in  the 
way  of  one  more  program  to  be  explained  and  “set  up.”  They  are 
very  patient  under  it  all.  But  the  Average  Man  is  thinking  of 

142 


THE  PARISH  MINISTER 


serving  an  ultimatum  on  the  minister.  And  the  minister,  being 
only  a  middleman,  can  merely  pass  this  ultimatum  along  to  those 
“higher  up.” 

The  modern  parish  minister,  in  all  charity  and  with  abundant 
good  will,  is  about  to  serve  notice  on  all  parties  concerned  that  he 
must  be  allowed  to  preach  religion,  in  something  of  its  totality, 
week  by  week,  or  else  the  denominations  and  the  philanthropies 
must  look  for  some  other  kind  of  man  to  do  their  job. 

He  would  make  perfectly  clear  what  he  means  by  these  words. 
He  would  assure  every  social  agency  in  modern  society  that  he 
regards  its  effort  as  a  valid  and  essential  part  of  the  total  reli¬ 
gious  work  of  our  time.  He  counts  none  of  them  secular  in  the 
sense  that  it  is  outside  the  moral  need  and  duty  of  the  day.  His 
attitude  is  not  one  of  indifference,  but  of  concern  for  the  whole 
body  of  organized  and  efficient  altruism.  But  he  must  affirm 
that  these  causes  have  now  become  so  numerous,  and  their  fields 
of  activity  so  specialized,  that  no  one  of  them  can  effectively 
monopolize  the  religious  spirit  or  offer  itself  as  a  modern  equiva¬ 
lent  for  the  total  idea  of  God.  He  would  remind  some  of  them  that 
they  seem  to  him  to  be  drifting  in  this  direction.  He  sometimes 
feels  a  touch  of  fanaticism  and  bigotry  about  their  attitude  toward 
him,  his  church  and  the  world  at  large.  They  do  not  realize  that 
the  last  caller  who  left  his  study  and  the  next  to  come  are  both 
advocates  of  causes  as  worthy  as  that  which  has  the  carpet  for 
the  moment,  and  that  the  minister’s  task  is  not  to  distract  seekers 
after  God  by  a  multiplicity  of  modern  attributes  of  God,  but  to 
try  to  help  men  to  something  like  the  total  vision. 

Having  said  this,  the  parish  minister  would  go  on  to  say  that 
this  position,  to  his  mind,  does  not  mean  retiring  again  to  some 
innocuous  generalities,  known  as  “the  pure  gospel.”  He  holds 
out  no  hope  to  those  who,  for  selfish  reasons,  would  like  to  see  the 
return  of  the  happy  days  when  the  Church  confined  itself  to  reli¬ 
gion  and  did  not  meddle  with  business  and  politics.  A  disgruntled 
parishioner  of  Newman’s  once  objected  that  the  Cardinal’s  preach¬ 
ing  was  interfering  with  the  way  he  did  business.  “Sir,”  said  New¬ 
man,  “it  is  the  business  of  the  Church  to  interfere  with  people.” 
The  parish  minister  sees  the  Church  as  Newman  saw  it.  But  his 
interference  with  the  world  is  a  kind  of  total  interference  with  its 
tempers  and  spirits,  an  effort  to  combat  and  convert  irreligious 

143 


THE  DISCIPLINES  OF  LIBERTY 


points  of  view,  rather  than  a  hasty  attempt  to  arbitrate  every 
concrete  dilemma  which  comes  along.  If  the  parish  minister  of 
to-day  claims  for  himself  the  right  to  preach  religion  as  he  sees 
it,  in  its  totality,  that  religion  will  not  be  some  harmless  platitude 
or  remote  speculation:  it  will  be  the  sum  of  the  fundamental 
tempers  which  must  enter  into  the  making  of  a  religious  society. 
He  merely  serves  notice  on  the  world  of  affairs  that,  when  he  says 
religion,  he  does  not  mean  some  pale,  private  piety,  but  that  he 
has  in  mind  Saint  Paul’s  description  of  Christianity  as  “dyna¬ 
mite,”  in  that  he  is  thinking  about  a  society  which  nothing  short 
of  some  revolution  of  worldly  points  of  view  will  ever  achieve. 

Finally,  the  parish  minister  would  invite  those  who  manage  the 
affairs  of  his  denomination  to  take  long  views  of  his  task  and 
theirs.  They  are  his  representatives.  He  has  been  at  times  a  poor 
constituent.  He  admires  their  fine  courage  in  seeing  a  world  far 
broader  than  his  bailiwick.  But  he  sometimes  feels  that  there  is 
too  much  Platonism  and  too  little  Aristotelianism  about  them 
when  they  approach  him  and  his  people.  It  is  hard  for  them  to  get 
their  vision  focused  as  they  look  at  the  single  parish  and  its 
minister.  They  find  it  relatively  easy  to  assess  the  parish  so  much 
and  turn  the  job  over  to  him  to  complete.  He  would  remind  them 
that  he  cannot  cry  “Wolf”  indefinitely.  His  rhetoric  is  limited; 
the  sentimental  touch  wears  out;  at  last  he  falls  back  upon  an 
appeal  for  personal  loyalty  to  himself. 

But  that  process  has  its  end,  and  beyond  he  cannot  go.  More¬ 
over,  he  would  say  to  his  denominational  representatives  quite 
candidly  that  he  can  no  more  substitute  the  World  Movement  of 
our  Denomination  for  the  idea  of  God,  than  he  can  substitute  the 
trichina  or  Senegambia.  And  that  is  what,  at  times,  it  seems  to 
him  that  he  is  expected  to  do.  Organizing  teams,  and  appointing 
captains  by  their  tens  and  hundreds,  and  fine-tooth-combing  the 
parish  once  more  is  not  necessarily  having  a  religious  experience; 
and  the  parish  minister  is  on  the  ragged  edge  of  concluding  that 
about  the  quickest  way  to  undercut  the  whole  support  of  the 
Church-at-Large  is  to  let  its  programs  and  machinery  get  into  the 
foreground  and  stay  there.  For  men  will  not  permanently,  or  even 
long,  accept  as  a  substitute  for  the  public  worship  of  God  a  con¬ 
gregational  committee  meeting  on  Sunday  morning  to  discuss  in 
detail  the  blue-print  plans  of  the  New  Jerusalem. 

144 


THE  PARISH  MINISTER 


The  parish  minister  insists  upon  some  restoration  of  his  ancient 
liberty  of  prophesying,  not  because  he  is  indifferent,  or  wishes  his 
church  to  be  indifferent,  to  any  and  all  of  these  claims  on  time, 
thought,  service  and  money,  but  because  he  feels  the  danger  of 
religious  shortsightedness,  and  even  of  fanaticism,  in  the  urgent 
clamor  of  these  many  voices.  He  believes  that,  if  men  can  be 
helped  to  true  and  adequate  ideas  of  God,  godly  men,  to  whom 
the  task  comes  immediately  home,  will  dispose  of  trichinosis  in 
due  time,  and  will  maintain  all  other  valid  causes  outside  the 
Church  and  inside.  But  he  fears  that,  if  men  lose  the  idea  of  God, 
and  forget  how  to  practice  the  Presence  of  God,  the  trichinae  will 
multiply  and  the  sects  will  indeed  collapse,  because  the  ruins  will 
have  been  emptied  for  good  and  all,  as  the  result  of  a  fundamen¬ 
tally  short-sighted  conception  both  of  the  Christian  Church  and 
of  the  Parish  Ministry. 

Oh,  if  we  draw  a  circle  premature, 

Heedless  of  far  gain, 

Greedy  for  quick  returns  of  profit,  sure 
Bad  is  our  bargain. 

It  is  against  that  bad  bargain,  into  which  it  seems  to  him  the 
causes  and  agencies  have  been  threatening  to  drive  him,  that  the 
parish  minister  is  trying  to  warn  the  world  and  to  fortify  himself. 


CHAPTER  IX. 


The  Validity  of  the  Church. 

WHEN  William  James  defined  religion  as  the  God-ward 
experiences  of  “individual  men  in  their  solitude”  he 
seems  to  have  intended  deliberately  to  rule  out  church 
Christianity.  He  was  concerned  with  what  he  called  “acute  reli¬ 
gion”  as  against  “chronic  religion,”  and  he  suspected  churches, 
not  without  cause,  of  the  latter  type  of  Christianity.  “Churches,” 
he  goes  on  to  say,  “when  once  established  live  at  second  hand 
upon  tradition — personal  religion  is  the  primordial  thing.” 

There  is  no  reasonable  doubt  that  James’s  point  of  departure 
is  essentially  valid  and  right.  Every  great  religious  idea  or  move¬ 
ment  in  history  has  had  its  origins  in  the  conviction  of  some 
individual  man  in  his  solitude.  There  is,  further,  no  doubt  that 
William  James  struck  a  note  that  needed  to  be  sounded  at  an 
opportune  moment  in  modern  religious  thought.  Our  world  had 
become  too  gregarious,  too  much  given  to  protective  coloration 
in  its  idealisms,  too  trustful  of  the  power  of  the  social  environ¬ 
ment,  too  skeptical  of  the  moral  value  of  the  desert  and  desert 
experiences.  At  least  James  has  Plotinus  on  his  side  in  the  historic 
definition  of  religion  as  “the  flight  of  the  alone  to  the  Alone.” 

Religion  is  the  most  intimate  of  all  human  experiences,  there¬ 
fore  it  always  must  be  in  some  ways  the  most  solitary.  But  it 
carries  at  the  heart  of  it  this  paradox,  that  the  deeper  and  truer 
the  solitary  experience  is  the  more  catholic  it  is  eventually  dis¬ 
covered  to  be.  The  moment  when  the  prophetic  soul  cries,  “I, 
even  I  only,  am  left,”  is  the  very  moment  when  its  eyes  are 
opened  to  behold  the  unsuspected  multitude  of  kindred  spirits. 
Perhaps  something  of  this  sort  lies  hidden  in  those  baffling  words 
of  Jesus  about  the  words  whispered  in  closets  only  to  be  shouted 
on  housetops,  the  pitiless  and  splendid  publicity  of  even  the 
most  intimate  moments  of  religious  experience. 

146 


THE  VALIDITY  OF  THE  CHURCH 


Moreover,  religion  like  every  other  great  experience  demands  to 
be  shared.  The  value  of  our  possessions  and  of  the  items  of  our 
living  may  be  roughly  appraised  by  the  inherent  necessity  of 
sharing  them  with  others.  The  books  we  value,  the  friends  we  en¬ 
joy,  the  places  we  cherish,  we  wish  others  to  know  and  to  enjoy 
with  us.  Our  noblest  affections  crave  companionship  that  our  joy 
may  be  made  full.  The  lover  who  wishes  you  to  meet  and  admire 
the  beloved  is  an  amiable  nuisance  whom  we  tolerate  with  an 
amused  good  will,  because  we  know  he  has  the  real  heart  of  the 
matter  in  him.  Were  he  a  silent  recluse  we  should  have  good  reason 
to  suspect  the  depth  and  reality  of  his  passion. 

It  is  not  otherwise  with  religion.  The  initial  reaction  to  a  reli¬ 
gious  experience  is  the  desire  to  go  and  find  the  brother  Simon, 
or  the  neighbor  Nathanael.  This  compulsion  to  sharing,  which  is 
in  all  true  religion,  is  not  studied  altruism,  it  is  not  even  enlight¬ 
ened  egoism,  it  is  the  spontaneous  outreach  of  a  nature  grappling 
with  a  Reality  too  vast  to  be  comprehended  in  solitude,  too  rich 
to  be  enjoyed  alone. 

From  this  social  outreaching  of  the  individual  who  in  his  soli¬ 
tude  knows  both  the  catholicity  of  his  most  personal  and  private 
transactions  with  God  and  his  need  of  comrades  that  his  joy  may 
be  made  perfect,  churches  spring.  Josiah  Royce  supplemented 
William  James’s  conception  of  religion  when  he  drew  his  pictures 
of  the  “Beloved  Community”  wherein  our  happiness  and  strength 
are  found,  and  where  our  ultimate  life  in  religion  must  be  lived. 
He  added,  however,  that  he  did  not  identify  this  beloved  com¬ 
munity  with  any  sect  or  institution  in  existence,  but  was  speaking 
of  the  Church  Invisible. 

Few  of  us  can  be  content  with  James’s  definition  of  religion  as 
a  form  of  the  “self-sufficing  power  of  solitude.”  Most  of  us  must 
create  or  realize  in  imagination  some  “Beloved  Community”  to 
which  we  belong.  In  Hardy’s  “Tess  of  the  D’Urbervilles”  we  find 
Angel  Clare  trying  to  teach  Tess  history.  Tess  rebels  because  she 
sees  no  use  in  learning  that  there  were  many  other  women  like 
herself  long  ago  and  that  there  will  be  many  more  women  like 
her  hereafter;  she  prefers  to  live  to  herself  in  her  ignorance. 
There  are  moments,  and  Tess  knew  them  bitterly,  when  utter 
spiritual  solitude  is  life’s  best  and  only  solace.  But  they  are  not 
the  major  moments,  nor  are  they  the  more  frequent  moments  in 

M7 


THE  DISCIPLINES  OF  LIBERTY 


life.  Most  of  us  draw  direct  strength  from  a  homely  knowledge 
of  our  little  human  part  in  the  experiences  of  the  race  as  a  whole, 
both  in  joy  and  sorrow.  It  is  a  help  to  realize  that  we  are  not 
alone.  “I  have  often  observed,”  says  Mark  Rutherford,  “that 
the  greatest  help  we  get  in  time  of  trouble  comes  to  us  from  some 
friend  who  says  quite  simply,  T  have  endured  all  that.’  ”  Now 
churches  have  their  origin  in  this  fundamental  mood.  Wherever 
there  is  a  common  spiritual  experience  there  two  or  three  will  be 
gathered  together.  Their  meeting  place  may  be  a  Cave  of  Adullam 
where  they  gather  to  share  their  tribulations  and  to  organize  their 
grievances  against  the  established  order.  It  may  be  a  formal 
cathedral  where  they  come  to  voice  their  obvious  social  wants. 
But  whatever  the  experience  and  the  meeting  place,  where  there  is 
a  community  of  experience  in  any  religious  concern,  there  by  the 
inherent  necessities  of  the  case  is  a  potential  church. 

But  all  this  has  nothing  to  do  with  the  First  Congregational 
Church  on  the  green  of  a  New  England  village,  or  the  Baptist 
Meeting  House  in  a  frontier  town,  or  the  Roman  Catholic  mission 
in  the  slums  of  a  great  city.  A  mind  of  the  austerity  and  wise 
human  tolerance  of  Josiah  Royce’s  mind  refrains  from  passing 
any  facile  criticism  upon  these  specific  churches,  yet  it  feels  no 
spiritual  connection  with  any  such  church  and  no  moral  obligation 
to  it;  while  minds  more  caustic  and  impatient  do  not  hesitate  to 
point  out  the  obvious  contrast  between  the  “Beloved  Community” 
as  visioned  by  the  idealist,  and  the  Calvary  Presbyterian  Church 
or  the  All  Souls’  Episcopal  Church  as  managed  by  a  session  or  a 
vestry. 

The  immediate  problem  of  the  Church  is  not  that  of  the 
“Beloved  Community”  but  of  the  particular  congregation  of  the 
particular  sect  and  of  the  sum  of  all  such  concrete  particulars. 
To  the  abstract  idea  most  men  will  give  theoretical  consent.  To 
an  inner  experience  of  the  Invisible  Church  the  few  will  always 
rise.  But  when  men  talk  of  “the  Church”  they  usually  mean  the 
average  parish  machinery  and  building  to  be  found  on  the  next 
corner.  And  it  is  this  institution  which  is  in  their  minds  when  they 
undertake  either  to  criticize  or  to  defend  the  Christian  Church. 

That  all  is  not  well  inside  those  four  walls  is  a  commonplace 
observation  which  has  lost  both  its  poignancy  and  its  pungence. 
The  sport  of  church-baiting  no  longer  has  any  terrors  for  the 

148 


THE  VALIDITY  OF  THE  CHURCH 


object  of  the  attack  or  any  zest  for  the  attackers  themselves. 
Ministers  and  church  members  have  long  since  become  so  familiar 
with  all  the  permutations  and  combinations  of  criticism  against 
the  Church  that  the  future  has  nothing  new  to  offer  them.  And  as 
for  the  critics,  the  day  is  long  gone  when  a  man  is  in  danger  of 
outlawing  himself  from  good  society  or  any  other  society  because 
of  his  caustic  strictures  on  the  Church. 

It  would  be  a  healthy  thing  for  contemporary  Christianity  if 
this  same  parish  church  occasionally  took  a  hand  at  criticism  and 
attempted  to  give  some  account  of  itself.  What  is  this  average 
church  doing  to  justify  its  existence?  What  is  its  real  function  in 
our  time?  Why  should  men  belong  to  it  and  support  it? 

At  the  very  outset  there  is  one  type  of  criticism  which  the 
Church  is  perfectly  justified  in  ruling  out  of  court.  This  is  the 
criticism  coming  from  men  and  women  who  have  no  real  under¬ 
standing  of  religion  and  who  care  nothing  about  it.  The  Church 
must  believe  in  the  fundamental  goodness  of  these  persons,  their 
salvability.  It  is  the  main  business  of  the  Church  to  try  to  make 
just  such  persons  care  about  religion.  But,  for  the  moment,  their 
wholesale  criticism  of  the  Church  springs  from  a  dull  materialistic 
view  of  life,  unrelieved  by  any  idealism. 

There  is  no  reason  why  we  should  take  too  seriously  the  snap 
judgment  on  the  Christian  Church  passed  by  a  man  whose  idea 
of  human  happiness  is  to  see  a  high-priced  baseball  player  knock 
a  home  run  into  the  right  field  bleachers.  The  baseball  bleachers 
are  certainly  out  of  touch  with  the  Church,  or  as  it  is  more  often 
put,  the  Church  is  out  of  touch  with  the  bleachers.  But  so  are  the 
bleachers  out  of  touch  with  all  the  nobler  efforts  and  achievements 
of  the  human  mind,  out  of  touch  with  art  galleries  and  libraries 
and  symphony  concerts,  out  of  touch  with  Rodin,  Francis  Thomp¬ 
son  and  Tschaikowsky.  The  home  run  to  the  bleachers  has  its  place 
in  the  economy  of  human  joy  and  sorrow,  but  the  bleachers  are 
not  the  judgment  seat  from  which  to  pass  on  the  final  values  of 
human  life,  or  the  mountain  top  from  which  the  Vision  of  Reality 
is  best  achieved. 

It  is  not  at  all  surprising  that  the  man  who  knows  far  more 
about  the  life  history  of  Mutt  and  Jeff  than  he  knows  about  the 
life  of  Jesus  of  Nazareth  finds  the  Church  dull  and  uninteresting, 
and  the  day’s  lesson  from  the  gospels  dry.  It  is  not  surprising  that 

149 


THE  DISCIPLINES  OF  LIBERTY 


young  men  and  women  whose  main  passion  in  life  is  to  keep 
abreast  of  the  musical  comedies  and  to  go  the  pace  in  modern 
dances  find  the  Church  stupid,  the  stately  hymns  of  Christendom 
stale  after  the  syncopation  of  the  jazz  band,  the  somber  reflections 
of  Job  uninteresting  beside  the  patter  of  the  comedienne.  It  is  not 
surprising  that  women  who  devour  the  social  gossip  of  the  Sunday 
paper  with  scrupulous  devotion,  but  who  never  heard  of  Mary  of 
Bethany,  do  not  see  the  use  of  going  to  church. 

There  is  no  fallacy  in  the  whole  logic  of  contemporary  religious 
thinking  so  great  as  the  fallacy  which  argues  from  the  half  truth 
that  “the  common  people  heard  him  gladly”  to  the  conclusion  that 
the  common  people  would  fill  the  churches  if  only  the  churches 
were  simple,  natural  and  very  real.  It  was  those  same  “common 
people”  who  a  day  or  so  later  howled  in  Pilate’s  court  for  Jesus’ 
death  and  then  jeered  around  his  cross. 

The  Church  must  humbly  confess  her  known  faults  and  scrupu¬ 
lously  search  her  corporate  life  and  practice  for  the  unsuspected 
faults,  but  there  is  absolutely  no  assurance  that  when  she  has  set 
her  own  house  in  order  she  will  come  into  instant  popularity.  The 
teaching  of  history  cuts  all  in  the  other  direction.  Passionate  and 
prophetic  souls  have  enjoyed  from  time  to  time  a  brief  flood  tide 
of  popular  acclaim  and  success,  but  so  soon  as  the  crowd  saw 
where  they  were  being  led  and  what  was  being  asked  of  them  they 
turned  back  again  to  those  Egyptian  flesh  pots  which  have  always 
been  the  meat  and  drink  of  that  baffling  creature,  “the  man  in 
the  street.”  The  average  church  may  be  a  rather  perfunctory  and 
lifeless  institution  but  on  the  whole  it  compares  favorably  with  / 
that  stumblingblock  on  which  all  idealisms  in  history  finally  trip, 
the  man  in  the  street. 

Shaw  reminds  us  that  there  is  no  error  in  social  analysis  so 
false  to  the  facts  as  that  which  crudely  divides  the  world  into 
religious  and  irreligious  persons.  He  says  that  there  are  in  every 
generation  a  handful  of  passionately  religious  persons  and  a 
smaller  number  of  actively  irreligious  persons;  one  Wesley  and  his 
small  following,  one  Tom  Paine  and  his  smaller  following,  and 
between  these  extremes  the  great  mass  of  healthy  Philistines  who 
eat,  drink  and  are  merry,  who  marry  and  are  given  in  marriage — 
whose  life,  in  short,  is  a  matter  of  finding  attractive  mates,  making 
money  and  having  “a  good  time.” 

150 


THE  VALIDITY  OF  THE  CHURCH 


All  this  by  way  of  saying  that  those  who  carry  the  burdens  and 
problems  of  the  Christian  Church  upon  their  hearts  and  minds 
are  not  to  take  too  seriously  the  strictures  upon  the  modern 
Church  which  have  their  origins  in  a  candidly  materialistic  view 
of  life.  The  chaplains  and  Y.  M.  C.  A.  workers  in  both  the  British 
and  American  forces  have  published  considerable  volumes  em¬ 
bodying  their  deductions  and  conclusions  as  to  the  religion  of  the 
average  man.  These  volumes  abound  with  the  hackneyed  criticism 
of  churches — “dull,  pedantic,  unreal,  insincere,  out  of  date.”  But 
these  criticisms  rest  on  the  plain  fact  that  the  man  in  the  street, 
i.e.,  80  to  85  per  cent  of  him,  is  not  religious  in  any  vital  sense  of 
the  word.  And  it  is  a  perfectly  fair  question  whether  the  classes 
whose  idea  of  Sunday  is  two  full  rounds  of  golf,  or  the  masses 
whose  idea  of  Sunday  is  an  aimless,  idle  self-indulgence  at  a 
raucous  seashore  resort  are  in  a  moral  position  to  pass  any  valu¬ 
able  criticism  on  Christianity,  institutional  or  otherwise.  These 
persons  are  not  to  be  regarded  as  the  final  appraisers  of  the 
Church  but  rather  as  its  challenge  and  its  opportunity.  They  are 
the  basis  of  the  sober  conclusion  of  the  American  chaplains  that 
“America  is  not  a  Christian  country  in  any  strict  sense  of  the 
word;  it  is  a  mission  field.” 

We  come,  on  the  other  hand,  to  that  residuum  of  the  very  real 
and  entirely  warranted  criticism  of  the  Church  which  has  its 
origin  in  thoughtful  and  self-sacrificing  lives.  There  is  always  in 
history  a  minority  of  passionate  and  prophetic  spirits  whose  per¬ 
sonal  zeal  and  devotion  outruns  the  chronic  religion  of  the 
churches,  who  would  like  to  belong  to  the  Church  if  they  could  do 
so  with  a  good  conscience,  but  whose  sincerity  and  ardor  chafe 
at  the  formalism  and  lethargy  of  the  average  church.  These  per¬ 
sons  are  troubled  about  the  state  of  the  Church  and  their  own  rela¬ 
tion  to  it.  Young  men  are  loath  to  enter  the  ministry  because  they 
feel  that  the  Church  is  cabin’d,  cribb’d  and  confined,  and  that 
through  it  they  will  not  find  the  opportunities  they  crave  for 
sincere  intellectual  and  ethical  self-expression  and  service.  Every¬ 
where  in  our  cities  there  are  scholars,  artists,  reformers  and  social 
servants  who  are  deeply  interested  in  religion,  who  crave  the  social 
expression  of  religion,  and  yet  cannot  bring  themselves  to  work 
in  and  through  the  Church.  To  these  persons  and  to  their  case  for 
the  prosecution  the  Church  must  give  serious  heed,  and  it  must 

151 


THE  DISCIPLINES  OF  LIBERTY 


have  some  adequate  answer  to  give  to  their  criticism  if  it  is  to 
win  their  steadily  increasing  numbers. 

As  to  the  temper  of  the  criticism,  we  should  realize  at  the  outset 
that  criticism  from  this  source  has  its  origin  in  a  deep  faith  in  the 
Church  as  a  potential  if  not  an  actual  embodiment  of  Chris¬ 
tianity.  It  is  precisely  because  men  have  such  high  ideals  for  the 
Church,  because  they  feel  so  deeply  what  she  ought  to  be  and 
might  be,  that  they  are  so  pained  and  perplexed  by  what  she  is. 
They  criticize  the  Church  not  because  they  are  indifferent  to  her, 
but  because  they  love  her  and  have  no  other  desire  for  her  than 
that  she  achieve  the  measure  of  the  stature  of  the  fullness  of 
Christ. 

Moreover,  this  sober  and  significant  criticism  springs  from  a 
newly  awakened  Christian  conscience.  The  deadliest  moral  opiate 
which  can  fasten,  as  a  habit,  on  any  man  or  institution,  is  the  dull 
habit  of  content  which  has  numbed  the  pain  of  the  divine  discon¬ 
tent  and  stopped  all  questionings.  The  awakened  conscience  of 
our  time  which  no  longer  takes  the  conventional  church  for 
granted  is  fighting  for  the  living  soul  of  religion  itself.  And  even 
though  it  be  a  long  and  painful  process  to  throw  off  the  moral 
drug  habit  of  inert  acquiescence,  this  ferment  of  the  true  con¬ 
science  is  an  immediate  gain  for  Christianity  and  an  ultimate  gain 
for  churches. 

Ferrero,  the  Italian  historian,  made  a  visit  to  America  some 
years  ago,  at  the  time  when  our  papers  and  magazines  were  filled 
with  the  muckraking  researches  into  municipal  politics.  “The 
Shame  of  the  Cities”  was  on  all  lips.  Ferrero  had  read  these 
criticisms  and  came  to  America  expecting  to  find  the  civic  morals 
of  this  country  debauched  beyond  anything  that  history  had  ever 
known.  To  his  perplexity  and  astonishment  he  found  the  average 
American  city  living  its  life  and  conducting  its  municipal  business 
on  a  moral  level  far  higher  than  he  had  anticipated.  In  many 
cases  he  thought  American  cities  politically  cleaner  and  better 
run  than  the  cities  of  Europe.  For  a  time  he  was  utterly  unable  to 
square  the  facts  with  the  theory,  until  he  realized  that  the  old 
Puritan  conscience,  long  dead  in  most  of  Europe,  was  still  alive 
and  functioning  in  America,  that  moral  vices  and  political  abuses 
which  had  been  tolerated  so  long  in  Europe  that  they  had  ceased 
to  awaken  criticism  any  longer,  still  troubled  the  American  con- 

152 


THE  VALIDITY  OF  THE  CHURCH 


science.  And  he  went  back  to  Europe  writing  down  “The  Shame 
of  the  Cities”  to  the  credit  of  American  public  morals.  Now  pre¬ 
cisely  the  same  fact  holds  true  of  all  the  serious  criticism  of  the 
modem  Church.  That  we  can  and  do  criticize  and  accept  criticism 
of  the  Church  is,  even  for  institutional  religion,  a  moral  asset  and 
not  a  moral  liability.  The  forward-moving  times  in  Christian  his¬ 
tory  have  not  been  the  ages  when  criticism  of  the  Church  was 
absent,  they  have  been  precisely  those  times  when  criticism  was 
most  active  and  outspoken,  both  within  and  without.  The  great 
Catholic  orders,  which  in  succession  purified  Catholicism,  the 
Reformation  itself,  the  subsequent  revolts  within  the  reformed 
churches,  were  the  constructive  critical  movements  by  which 
Christianity  as  a  whole  has  been  advanced.  In  short,  in  every 
vital  epoch  of  Christian  history,  rebuke  of  the  Church  has 
abounded,  and  such  ages  have  eventually  proved  themselves  to 
be  the  creative  ages.  The  temper  of  sober  criticism  is,  therefore, 
seen  in  full  historical  perspective,  perhaps  the  most  hopeful  sign 
on  the  contemporary  religious  horizon. 

Again,  we  must  realize  that  all  this  criticism  directed  against 
the  Church  is  simply  a  single  aspect  of  a  far  wider  problem,  per¬ 
haps  the  major  problem  of  the  present  time,  the  relation  of  the 
moral  freeman  to  the  fixed  institution.  The  question  which  the 
thoughtful  man  faces  to-day  is  not  the  mere  question  of  his  rela¬ 
tion  to  the  Church  as  such;  that  is  simply  one  item  and  aspect  of 
the  far  wider  problem  of  his  relation  to  all  institutionalism,  to 
the  State,  to  universities,  to  industries.  The  problem,  “Why  go 
to  Church?”  is  of  the  same  piece  of  cloth  as  the  question,  “Why 
go  to  College?”  for  colleges  are  turning  out  academic  products  no 
less  conventional  and  hall-marked  than  the  normal  human  output 
of  churches.  The  query,  “Why  join  a  Church?”  is  of  the  same 
fabric  as  the  query,  “Why  join  a  political  party?”  for  political 
parties  are  as  hidebound  and  artificial  as  religious  sects.  What 
the  man  of  to-day  is  really  thinking  through  is  the  total  problem 
of  his  relation  to  all  institutions. 

There  has  appeared  recently  an  appraisal  of  the  work  of  one  of 
the  major  departments  of  a  great  American  university,  written  by 
a  professor  in  that  institution.  He  says  that  the  world  at  large 
feels  toward  himself  and  his  colleagues  a  contemptuous  indiffer¬ 
ence.  The  universities  are  said  to  be  out  of  touch  with  actual  life, 


153 


THE  DISCIPLINES  OF  LIBERTY 


they  unfit  men  for  active  life,  they  breed  academic  pedants  and 
social  snobs.  If  the  reader  were  to  run  through  the  indictment  and 
substitute  the  word  Church  for  the  word  University,  the  text 
would  stand  as  it  is,  as  the  familiar  criticism  of  the  Church.  If 
there  are  men  and  women  out  of  patience  with  the  churches  to-day, 
the  same  persons  are  out  of  patience  with  our  whole  educational 
system,  from  the  kindergarten  through  the  professional  post¬ 
graduate  school.  The  colleges  have  to  face,  to-day,  indictments  of 
their  corporate  life  as  sweeping  and  drastic  as  anything  visited 
upon  churches.  Likewise  our  modern  political  and  industrial 
machinery,  our  courts  of  law,  our  legislatures  and  our  hereditary 
parties,  our  arbitrary  capitalism  and  our  equally  arbitrary  labor 
unionism,  are  all  being  subjected  to  the  searching  reexamination  of 
the  free  mind.  What  irks  us  is  not  institutional  Christianity 
alone,  but  all  institutionalism  with  the  formality  and  generally 
mediocre  level  of  attainment  which  is  implied  in  the  very  nature 
of  an  institution.  It  is  the  doctrine  of  the  inglorious  moral  mean 
by  which  institutions  live  that  arouses  the  resentment  and  ardor 
of  the  freeman. 

When  we  come  to  the  larger  problem  of  the  validity  of  any 
institution,  whether  it  be  Church  or  State,  a  college,  a  political 
party  or  a  labor  union,  we  are  face  to  face  with  one  of  the  most 
difficult  questions  in  human  history.  Emerson  said,  “An  institution 
is  the  lengthened  shadow  of  a  great  man.”  The  contrast  between 
the  live  man  and  the  thin  and  lifeless  shadow  always  gives  rise  to 
the  critical  temper.  It  was  said  that  Mark  Hopkins  on  one  end  of 
a  log  and  a  student  on  the  other  end  of  the  log  constituted  a 
university.  But  Mark  Hopkins  was  not  immortal  and  the  students 
crowded  their  end  of  the  log  and  Williams  College  is  the  result. 
Whether  Williams  College  of  to-day,  with  its  faculty  and  student 
body  and  conventional  classrooms,  is  as  effective  a  medium  for  the 
truth,  as  complete  an  incarnation  of  the  idea  of  education,  as 
Mark  Hopkins,  the  single  student  and  the  mutual  log  is  a  per¬ 
fectly  debatable  question.  The  practical  problem  is  not  how  to 
make  Mark  Hopkins  immortal  but  what  to  do  when  nature  in  due 
time  removes  him  from  the  log.  Are  he  and  his  ideas  to  perish 
with  him,  or  are  they  to  be  perpetuated  in  the  lengthened  shadow 
which  still  rests  as  a  college  on  the  Berkshire  Hills? 

Any  one  of  us  would  rather  have  for  a  suit  of  clothes  a  piece 

i54 


THE  VALIDITY  OF  THE  CHURCH 


of  Irish  homespun  woven  on  the  hand  looms  in  the  cottages  of 
Donegal,  with  the  bits  of  heather  still  uncombed  from  the  fleece, 
than  the  best  piece  of  woolen  goods  turned  out  of  an  American 
mill.  But  there  are  not  looms  enough  or  cottagers  enough  in  Done¬ 
gal  to  clothe  us  as  we  should  like  to  be  clothed,  and  the  actual 
option  is  going  unclothed  or  taking  the  product  of  the  woolen  mill. 
No  one  of  us,  save  in  moments  of  election  frenzy,  really  identifies 
his  political  party  with  the  fathers  and  founders  of  his  country 
and  its  succession  of  political  idealists.  We  do  not  monopolize  the 
Declaration  of  Independence  and  the  Constitution  for  our  brand 
of  vote.  Our  parties  are  always  something  less  than  the  original 
and  true  idea  of  democracy.  Yet  the  practical  option  the  citizen 
faces  is  the  choice  of  the  best  party  available,  whatever  its  obvious 
limitations,  or  the  entire  frustration  of  his  citizenship. 

The  problem  which  the  religious  man  faces  in  his  relation  to  the 
Church  is  qualitatively  identical  with  these  other  concrete  prob¬ 
lems  of  his  wider  life.  The  absolute  identification  of  the  Church 
with  Christ  must  always  savor  either  of  arrogance  or  ignorance. 
Churches  which  make  such  claims  for  themselves  lay  themselves 
open  to  fair  criticism.  The  mind  of  the  average  sect  is  by  no  means 
the  mind  of  Christ,  nor  is  the  life  of  the  average  church  to  be 
compared  with  the  simplicity  and  spiritual  purity  of  Jesus’  original 
comradeship  with  his  disciples.  Just  in  so  far  as  Mark  Hopkins 
and  his  single  student  sitting  together  on  the  log  was  a  simpler 
and  more  adequate  incarnation  of  the  idea  of  education  than  the 
subsequent  college,  just  so  far  were  Jesus  and  his  disciples  on  the 
Mount  of  Transfiguration  a  better  and  fuller  expression  of  what  we 
mean  by  the  Christian  religion  than  the  subsequent  parish  church 
of  any  given  sect.  There  is  at  least  that  much  truth  in  the  theory 
that  the  Golden  Age  of  the  gospel  was  the  primitive  age. 

The  case  for  any  and  every  institution  in  history  is  a  debatable 
case  as  against  the  case  for  the  absolutely  free  man.  The  free  man 
is  always  the  historical  first  cause  of  every  institution.  He  seldom 
senses  in  his  own  lifetime  the  organization  which  is  to  grow  up 
around  his  name  and  work.  His  part  as  the  author  of  an  institu¬ 
tion  is  more  often  unconscious  than  conscious.  But  we  are  entirely 
within  the  bounds  of  historical  truth  when  we  speak  of  him  as  a 
historical  cause  of  institutions.  The  case  of  Jesus  and  the  Church 
is  no  exception  to  this  general  rule.  There  is  little  reason  to  sup- 

155 


THE  DISCIPLINES  OF  LIBERTY 


pose  that  Jesus  deliberately  intended  to  establish  a  new  institution 
in  history.  Jesus  belonged  essentially  to  the  order  of  the  prophets, 
and  the  prophetic  mind  has  no  interest  in  ecclesiasticism  for  its 
own  sake.  But  the  Church  is  both  an  inevitable  and  a  valid  con¬ 
sequence  of  the  life  of  Jesus.  Thus  we  may  speak,  broadly,  of 
Jesus  as  the  author  of  our  faith  and  the  founder  of  the  Christian 
Church. 

But  what  the  Church  together  with  all  other  institutions  so 
often  forgets  is  the  fact  that  the  free  man  is  also  its  final  cause. 
If  Jesus  was  the  author  of  our  faith  he  is  also  to  be  its  finisher, 
and  Christlike  characters  in  their  liberty  are  the  ends  which 
churches  exist  to  realize.  The  peril  which  attends  the  life  of  the 
Church  is  the  peril  that  in  this  cycle  from  an  initial  freedom  to  an 
ultimate  freedom  the  process  shall  be  arrested,  and  the  institution 
shall  come  to  regard  itself  as  its  own  end.  This  is,  as  a  matter  of 
simple  fact,  the  moral  weakness  of  nine  tenths  of  our  organized 
Christianity.  Churches  and  churchmen  treat  the  institution  as  the 
center  of  values  and  alienate  to  themselves  the  spiritual  worth 
which  attaches  only  to  free  men.  When  Kant  said  that  one  of 
the  signs  of  true  morality  is  the  habit  of  treating  men  as  ends 
in  themselves,  he  passed  judgment  on  all  sorts  and  conditions  of 
modern  institutions  which  are  too  prone  to  treat  men  as  means 
to  their  own  ends.  The  Prussian  theory  of  the  State  is  the  extreme 
perversion  of  the  only  valid  doctrine  as  to  the  relation  of  men  and 
institutions.  But  Prussianizing  tendencies  have  communicated 
themselves  to  many  non-Prussian  quarters,  and  it  is  seldom  that 
stress  is  laid  to-day  upon  the  fact  that  states,  churches  and  the 
like  exist  “for  the  people.” 

In  some  ways  those  words  of  Jesus  about  the  Sabbath  are  the 
most  revolutionary  utterance  in  the  gospels.  They  lay  the  axe 
squarely  at  the  root  of  all  institutionalism  which  has  usurped  the 
historical  privileges  and  priority  of  the  freeman.  That  saying  of 
Jesus  is  capable  of  almost  infinite  restatement,  and  indeed,  to  be 
fully  understood,  must  be  translated  into  its  widest  and  farthest 
implications.  Men  were  not  made  to  belong  to  states,  to  join 
churches,  to  subscribe  to  sacred  literatures,  to  recite  creeds,  to 
tend  machines.  All  these  are  made  for  man’s  own  ends.  When  the 
ecclesiastical,  political  or  industrial  machine  precedes  the  freeman 
in  history  it  reverses  the  true  order  of  moral  values.  Most  modern 

156 


THE  VALIDITY  OF  THE  CHURCH 


institutions,  however,  churches  included,  are  very  reluctant  to 
admit  that  Jesus  was  right  in  his  flat  dictum  that  these  social 
devices  were  made  for  man.  And  too  often,  when  they  sense  this 
attitude  in  the  freeman,  they  follow  Jerusalem  and  Rome  in 
suppressing  him  as  guilty  of  heresy  and  treason. 

The  ecclesiastic  must  always  be  puzzled  and  dismayed  by  the 
prophetic  assurance  that  “there  is  no  church  in  heaven.”  Such  a 
heaven,  to  the  “high-church”  mind  will  be  a  place  shorn  of  all 
earth’s  dearest  interests  and  tasks.  With  the  Church  abolished 
there  will  be  nothing  for  the  ecclesiastic  to  do.  But  the  freeman 
will  understand  this  prophecy  because  he  will  not  hesitate  to  apply 
to  the  Church  the  standard  by  which  he  measures  all  institutions. 
The  best  and  most  effective  institution  in  history  is  that  which 
aims  to  fulfill  and  supplant  itself  by  free  men.  The  far-seeing  in¬ 
stitution,  in  the  forerunner’s  spirit,  is  willing  to  decrease  just  in 
so  far  as  its  mission  is  realized  by  an  increase  of  true  liberty. 
Canon  Barnett  used  to  say  that  no  philanthropy  ought  to  exist 
as  an  organized  effort  for  more  than  twenty  years.  If  it  is  an  effi¬ 
cient  institution  it  will  have  realized  its  particular  end  in  that  time. 
If  the  end  remains  unrealized,  it  would  seem  that  the  institution 
has  become  more  concerned  with  keeping  up  its  own  organization 
than  with  serving  the  world,  and  it  had  best  dissolve.  On  this 
principle  he  once  said  that  his  highest  ambition  for  Toynbee  Hall 
was  that  it  might  become  unnecessary.  The  highest  ambition 
which  any  churchman  can  have  for  the  historical  Church  is  that 
it  may  become  unnecessary.  If  he  really  stands  in  the  right  rela¬ 
tion  to  religion  he  looks  with  great  desire  for  the  coming  of  those 
days  of  which  the  Lord  saith:  “I  will  put  my  law  in  their  inward 
parts,  and  write  it  in  their  hearts.  And  they  shall  teach  no  more 
every  man  his  neighbor,  and  every  man  his  brother,  saying,  Know 
the  Lord:  for  they  shall  all  know  me.”  John  Tauler  says,  some¬ 
where,  that  the  holiest  man  he  ever  knew  had  never  heard  more 
than  six  sermons  in  his  life.  When  he  had  heard  these  sermons  and 
saw  how  the  matter  stood  with  him  he  went  and  did  as  the  preacher 
said  and  the  matter  ended  there.  It  is  because  so  few  members  of 
the  congregation  take  the  offices  of  the  Church  directly  and  wholly 
to  heart  that  churches  and  ministers  still  have  a  work  to  do.  A 
race  of  men  like  Tauler’s  friend  would  empty  and  close  the 
churches  inside  two  months!  But  that  would  be  the  millennium, 

157 


THE  DISCIPLINES  OF  LIBERTY 

for  such  is  the  heavenly  end  every  true  Christian  institution 
desires. 

Meanwhile,  in  the  historic  cycle  from  initial  freedom  to  ultimate 
freedom,  institutions  do  serve  a  necessary  and  entirely  valid  place 
in  our  life.*  Whatever  may  be  said  against  them,  this  must  be  said 
in  their  defense,  they  are  the  storehouses  of  human  experience  in 
its  totality.  Into  them  is  gathered  the  cumulative  wisdom  of  the 
race.  The  harvesting  is  done  broadly  and  crudely.  The  tares  are 
not  always  separated  from  the  wheat.  The  institution  always 
garners  the  total  yield  of  history,  both  for  better  and  for  worse. 
Yet  the  institution  does  save  each  oncoming  generation  from  the 
tedious  necessity  of  having  to  begin  its  life  all  over  again.  It 
enables  the  newcomer  on  the  human  scene  to  take  up  the  task 
where  his  predecessor  laid  it  down.  “Other  men  labored  and  ye  are 
entered  into  their  labors,”  is  the  legend  over  the  threshold  of  all 
institutions.  Here  is  the  sum  of  the  experience  of  man  in  society  in 
his  unremitted  venture  of  trial  and  error.  The  institution  is  not 
only  the  symbol  of  the  continuity  of  human  experience,  it  is  the 
very  stuff  and  fabric  of  that  continuity,  which  gives  reality  and 
meaning  to  the  time  process. 

The  case  for  the  Church,  then,  must  stand  or  fall  with  the  case 
for  all  institutionalism.  Its  central  problems  and  mission  cannot 
be  dissociated  from  the  wider  considerations  which  attach  to 
the  validity  of  political,  educational,  economic  and  industrial 
organizations.  None  of  these  social  machines  is  entirely  adequate 
as  the  medium  for  freedom  in  its  particular  field.  All  of  them  tend 
to  forget  the  liberty  which  at  the  first  inspired  them  and  the  true 
freedom  which  they  exist  to  realize.  The  case  against  the  Church 
as  it  fails  to  incarnate  the  free  spirit  of  Christ  is  precisely  the  case 
against  the  state  which  fails  to  measure  up  to  the  ideal  of  de¬ 
mocracy,  the  college  which  falls  short  of  all  truth,  the  mill  which 
does  not  shelter  free  and  happy  workmen. 

In  one  of  the  most  suggestive  passages  in  recent  religious  litera¬ 
ture,!  Professor  Hocking  combats  the  theory  that  religion  in  his¬ 
tory  can  be  defended  on  any  utilitarian  basis,  and  ventures  the 
suggestion  that  religion  is  not  a  “useful”  but  a  “fertile”  principle, 
whose  major  function  is  a  perpetual  parentage.  He  points  out  the 

*  See  “Human  Nature  and  Its  Remaking,”  W.  E.  Hocking,  pp.  177-225. 

t  “The  Meaning  of  God  in  Human  Experience,”  pp.  11-26. 

158 


THE  VALIDITY  OF  THE  CHURCH 


perfectly  plain  fact  that  practically  every  one  of  the  modern 
arts  had  its  origin  in  a  religious  inspiration.  Painting,  sculpture, 
poetry,  law,  music,  teaching,  social  service — all  of  them  are  the 
direct  offspring  of  religion.  And  he  raises  the  question  whether 
the  case  for  religion  must  not  rest  upon  what  Tyrrell  calls  this 
“divine  fecundity”  rather  than  upon  the  pragmatic  test  of  effi¬ 
ciency  at  any  given  moment. 

Some  such  parallel  may  be  made  in  the  case  of  the  religious  in¬ 
stitution  as  well  as  the  religious  idea.  Hocking  likens  religion  to 
the  queen  bee.  There  is  a  similar  illustration  which  may  serve  as 
a  symbol  in  the  case  of  the  Church.  Biology  is  familiar  in  some 
of  the  lower  orders  of  life  with  the  phenomenon  of  alternating 
generations.  There  is,  for  example,  a  species  of  jellyfish  which 
lives  in  such  a  cycle.  One  generation  is  made  up  of  free-swimming 
individuals  ranging  as  wide  as  the  limits  of  the  sea  itself.  The 
offspring  of  this  generation  fastens  at  once  to  the  sea  bottom  and 
lives  there  a  permanent,  sessile,  plantlike  life,  never  moving  from 
its  rooted  place.  But  this  fixed  generation  in  due  time  buds  off 
from  its  stock  a  further  generation  which  finally  breaks  away  from 
the  sessile  parent  and  becomes  the  free-swimming  type. 

The  life  of  man  in  society  is  essentially  a  succession  of  alter¬ 
nating  generations.  The  free  man  ranges  through  the  world  at  his 
own  will.  But  his  historical  successors  settle  down  in  history  and 
become  fixed  around  his  memory  and  tradition  as  an  institution. 
This  fixed  institution,  however,  in  due  time  develops  and  finally 
buds  off  other  free  men  who  break  away,  remove  themselves  from 
the  parent  stock  and  become  in  turn  the  founders  of  still  other 
institutions  in  society.  Why  this  should  be  so  is  hard  to  say.  How 
the  ends  of  man’s  life  in  society  and  the  longer  purposes  of  his¬ 
tory  are  served  better  by  this  baffling  economy  than  by  uninter¬ 
rupted  generations  of  free  men  is  a  problem  that  defies  any  cheap 
and  easy  solution. 

The  value  of  this  cycle  of  alternating  generations  in  the  spiritual 
life  of  the  race  may  lie  in  the  fact  that  freedom  is  so  costly  and 
evanescent  an  achievement  that  its  successive  advances  can  be 
made  permanently  good  to  the  race  only  by  periods  of  arrest  in 
institutions.  Saint  Augustine,  in  his  “City  of  God,”  ventures  to 
criticize  the  tedious  and  painful  process  by  which  human  beings 
come  to  birth  and  says  he  would  have  ordered  better  had  he  been 

159 


THE  DISCIPLINES  OF  LIBERTY 


the  Creator.  One  may  criticize  the  social  processes  whereby  free 
men  are  born  into  society  only  after  gestation  within  the  sessile 
institutions.  But  the  fact  is  plain,  and  meanwhile  the  purposes 
of  God  are  served  in  their  own  way  by  the  existing  methods. 

To  wipe  the  slate  clean  of  all  institutions,  to  propose  to  eradi¬ 
cate  from  the  history  of  ongoing  freedom  its  alternate  generations 
of  institutional  fixity  is  not  to  usher  in  the  millennium.  As 
history  stands  this  is  simply  to  open  the  doors  to  old  chaos  come 
again.  The  institution  gives  opportunity  for  mental  and  moral 
assimilation  of  the  fruits  of  freedom.  It  is  the  chance  for  the  prag¬ 
matist  and  the  utilitarian,  which  otherwise  they  would  not  have. 
Moreover,  the  institution  furnishes  the  soil  of  discipline  from  which 
further  forms  of  freedom  are  to  spring.  The  freest  souls  in  Chris¬ 
tian  history  have  not  been  those  nihilist  natures  who  escaped  or 
evaded  the  discipline  of  life  within  the  formal  institution.  They 
have  always  been  those  men  who  learned  of  the  Church  of  their 
own  day  all  that  she  had  to  teach,  and  who  transcended  her  in 
their  own  final  freedom  only  when  they  had  exhausted  her  re¬ 
sources. 

Jesus  is  the  outstanding  example  of  this  principle.  We  more  and 
more  tend  to  regard  him  as  the  full  flower  and  fruit  of  Judaism, 
not  as  a  “sport”  or  “freak  of  nature”  in  the  spiritual  history  of 
the  race.  His  final  matchless  freedom  rested  upon  a  full  initial 
submission  to  Judaism,  a  discriminating  jealousy  for  the  true 
value  of  the  jot  and  the  tittle,  which  on  the  basis  of  any  other 
explanation  is  absolutely  unintelligible.  The  gospels  have  little  or 
no  meaning  apart  from  the  law  and  the  prophets.  To  isolate  them 
as  spontaneous  manifestations  of  religion  is  to  make  the  liberty 
of  Christ  an  accident,  not  a  normal  historical  reality.  Paul  stands 
in  like  case.  He  had  to  be  a  good  Pharisee  in  order  to  become  a 
good  Christian.  The  free  spirit  of  Christ  would  have  had  no  mean¬ 
ing  for  him  had  he  not  drained  the  moral  resources  of  the  law  to 
their  very  end.  The  eighth  chapter  of  Romans  could  never  have 
been  written  had  not  Paul  passed  clean  through  the  disciplines 
recorded  in  the  prior  seventh  chapter.  Martin  Luther  had  given 
the  Roman  doctrine  of  salvation  by  works  full  and  fair  trial  in 
his  Augustinian  days,  and  it  was  just  this  moral  drudgery  of  the 
monastery  which  led  him  on  finally  to  his  characteristic  doctrine 
of  salvation  by  faith. 

160 


THE  VALIDITY  OF  THE  CHURCH 


The  Church,  or  something  like  the  Church,  seems  to  be  his¬ 
torically  necessary  as  a  foil  to  religious  anarchy  and  as  the  source 
and  exciting  occasion  for  a  disciplined  freedom.  It  is  a  perfectly 
fair  question  whether  there  would  have  been  any  permanent  incre¬ 
ment  of  Christian  liberty  down  the  centuries  were  it  not  for  the 
sessile  sects  which  always  awaken  the  hunger  for  liberty,  and 
within  which  the  rudiments  of  the  fuller  freedom  are  always  con¬ 
ceived.  Bernard,  Francis,  Wycliff,  Huss,  the  Reformers,  Fox, 
Wesley,  Emerson,  Tolstoi,  stand  in  Christian  history  as  radiant 
apostles  of  religious  liberty  at  its  best,  but  their  freedom  had  its 
uniform  origin  in  a  full  discipline  within  the  formal  ecclesiasticism 
of  their  own  times.  The  free  man  in  religious  history  always  excites 
our  admiration.  We  recognize  him  as  the  fulfillment  of  the  spiritual 
aim  of  history,  an  earnest  of  what  all  religious  men  finally  are  to 
be.  But  in  our  preoccupation  with  his  mature  freedom  we  too  often 
ignore  his  prior  history  as  a  member  of  some  specific  church, 
which  mediated  to  him  the  Christian  tradition  as  a  whole,  and 
was  his  point  of  spiritual  departure. 

To  the  practical  question,  How  long  ought  a  man  to  remain  a 
member  of  a  church  with  which  he  does  not  find  himself  in  entire 
accord?  the  historical  answer  is  perfectly  plain,  “As  long  as  he 
possibly  can.”  For  if  he  consults  merely  his  own  spiritual  future, 
to  say  nothing  of  possible  service  to  the  religious  idea,  his  freedom 
will  be  better  disciplined  and  more  full  of  meaning  if  he  does  not 
hasten  his  departure.  It  must  have  been  this  perception  of  the 
mediate  value  of  the  institution,  even  when  it  irked  him  most, 
which  led  George  Tyrrell  to  insist  that  he  would  stay  in  the 
Roman  Church  as  long  as  he  could.  “I  uphold  the  duty  of  each 
man  to  stay  within  and  work  for  his  own  household  as  long  as 
he  conscientiously  can.  ...  I  will  do  nothing  unnecessarily  to 
procure  my  own  excommunication,  and  when  it  happens  I  will 
stand  on  the  doorstep  and  knock  and  ring  and  make  myself  a 
nuisance  in  every  way.”  To  be  a  Francis  or  a  Wycliff  or  a  Wesley 
is  an  entirely  legitimate  ideal  for  every  Christian.  Such  a  destiny 
will  always  mean  some  measure  of  schism  with  the  Church  that 
now  is.  But  men  never  have  come  and  never  will  come  to  these 
hours  of  prophetic  freedom  through  deliberate  and  persistent 
neglect  of  the  existing  Church.  Only  the  man  who  knows  the 
Church  of  to-day  through  and  through,  and  who  has  exhausted  her 

161 


THE  DISCIPLINES  OF  LIBERTY 


resources,  can  lead  the  way  to  the  Church  of  to-morrow.  That 
Church  of  to-morrow  will  never  be  achieved  by  those  who  ignore 
the  corporate  continuity  of  Christian  experience.  If  it  is  to  come 
at  all,  it  will  be  the  final  achievement  of  sincere  and  earnest  men 
now  in  the  Church. 

The  Church  is  a  human  institution,  of  divine  origin  and  of 
divine  destiny  if  we  will  have  it  so,  but  at  the  present  moment 
as  fallible  and  as  far  short  of  its  author  and  finisher  as  are  all 
these  kindred  groups.  If  the  Church  seems  a  less  perfect  social 
mechanism  than  the  others,  that  is  merely  because  the  gospel  of 
Christ  is  so  much  more  absolute  and  austere  an  ideal  than  the  ends 
served  by  avowedly  secular  institutions.  The  flaws  of  all  insti¬ 
tutionalism  are  more  patent  in  the  case  of  the  Church  than  else¬ 
where  because  the  contrast  between  Christ  and  the  Church  is  more 
glaring  than  the  contrasts  between  the  Declaration  of  Inde¬ 
pendence  and  the  Congress  of  the  United  States,  or  between  Mark 
Hopkins’s  log  and  the  average  Williams  College  lecture  room.  The 
Church  always  has  been  the  first  institution  to  fall,  and  always 
will  be  the  first  to  fall,  under  the  condemnation  of  the  free  spirit, 
not  because  she  is  an  exception  to  an  otherwise  adequate  and 
perfect  adjustment  of  human  institutions  to  their  ideal  ends,  but 
because  she  is  the  most  patent  illustration  of  a  problem  that  is 
all  but  universal  in  human  history.  She  is  the  stock  example  of 
the  inevitable  perils  of  all  institutional  life.  But  qualitatively  the 
problems  which  surround  her  life  are  of  the  same  stuff  as  those 
which  attend  the  political  state,  the  modern  profession  with  its 
fixed  traditions,  the  orthodox  bank  and  the  orthodox  labor  union. 

The  awakened  Christian  Church  will  not  shirk  the  criticisms 
which  may  be  fairly  passed  upon  her  corporate  life.  She  will  not 
attempt  to  deny  the  discrepancy  between  the  gospel  idea  in  its 
original  and  ultimate  purity  and  her  faith  and  practice  at  any 
given  moment  in  her  history.  The  consciousness  of  that  contrast 
is  the  seat  of  the  divine  discontent  whereby  the  half-gods  are 
dethroned.  But  the  Church  has  a  perfect  right  to  insist  that  men 
shall  have  a  fine  and  total  consistency  in  their  attitude  toward 
her.  She  asks  that  this  age  shall  not  isolate  her  problem  as  one 
unique  in  the  modern  world,  but  that  it  shall  treat  her  case  as 
part  of  the  total  problem  of  our  civilization,  that  if  men  abandon 
her  because  they  elect  the  absolute  religious  idea  as  against  the 

162 


THE  VALIDITY  OF  THE  CHURCH 


historically  imperfect  and  conditioned  institution,  they  shall  fol¬ 
low  this  logic  to  its  conclusions  in  their  relation  to  all  the  other 
major  institutions  in  modern  life,  and  live  as  hermits  apart  from 
all  the  imperfect  social  machinery  by  which  the  ideas  of  justice, 
knowledge,  health  and  the  like  are  served.  The  man  who  refuses 
to  have  anything  to  do  with  the  Church  because  it  does  not  meas¬ 
ure  up  to  the  fullness  of  the  stature  of  Christ,  but  who  blindly 
votes  his  party  ticket  every  election  day,  who  runs  in  the  deep, 
narrow  rut  of  his  profession,  and  generally  serves  as  a  buttress  for 
the  dull  conventions  of  the  present  order,  lives  in  a  house  divided 
against  itself,  and  is  a  contradiction  in  moral  terms.  The  true 
Church  will  never  gainsay  the  really  free  and  prophetic  spirit  in 
history.  She  will  not  prosecute  Abraham  Lincoln  because  he  could 
not  join  her.  She  has,  however,  a  moral  right  to  some  impatience 
and  distrust  of  those  lesser  souls  who  are  always  caviling  at  the 
motes  in  her  eye,  but  who  never  sense  the  beam  in  their  own  eye 
which  blinds  them  to  their  slavish  devotion  to  all  other  modern 
institutions.  The  Church  asks  of  right-minded  men,  not  that  they 
shall  cease  their  criticism  of  her,  but  that  they  shall  give  to  her 
that  discriminating  and  creative  loyalty  which  they  owe  to  the 
other  major  institutions  of  our  age.  The  only  logical  alternative 
is  a  total  social  nihilism,  a  lonely  hut  on  Walden  Pond,  a  lodge 
in  the  desert,  the  self-sufficing  power  of  an  absolutely  consistent 
solitude. 


CHAPTER  X. 


The  Work  of  the  Church  in  the  World 

of  To-day. 

TOWARD  the  end  of  his  spiritual  Odyssey,  George 
Tyrrell  said,  “God  will  not  ask  us,  What  sort  of  Church 
have  you  lived  in?  but,  What  sort  of  Church  have  you 
longed  for?”  Every  Christian  in  the  modern  world  is  entitled  to 
the  solace  of  the  homely  conviction  that  in  the  matter  of  churches, 
as  in  the  matter  of  character,  what  he  aspires  to  be  is  a  truer 
indication  of  his  real  nature  than  that  which  he  has  thus  far 
achieved.  The  many  sects  are,  at  the  best,  broken  lights  of  the 
Holy  Church  Universal,  which  is  more  than  they. 

Membership  in  any  given  parish  or  communion  is  for  all 
thoughtful  men  to-day  simply  an  arbitrary  expression  of  the 
working  will  to  be  on  the  creative  rather  than  the  critical  side  of 
the  issue. 

Meantime  in  the  still  recurring  fear 
Lest  myself  at  unawares  be  found, 

While  attacking  the  choice  of  my  neighbours  round, 

With  none  of  my  own  made — I  choose  here ! 

For  every  candid  man  realizes  that  under  present  conditions  the 
“torch  for  burning”  is  a  much  easier  tool  to  master  and  to  use 
than  “the  hammer  for  building.”  However  much  a  man  may  be 
stirred  by  the  rebel  temper,  and  however  deeply  he  may  be 
troubled  by  the  divine  discontent,  he  knows  in  his  soberer  mo¬ 
ments  that  the  Kingdom  of  God  will  never  be  fashioned  by  a 
wrecking  gang. 

The  deeper  peril  of  the  whole  critical  temper  which  permeates 
so  much  of  the  liberalism  and  latitudinarianism  of  our  time  is  its 
neglect  of  the  creative  capacity  of  the  human  soul.  We  live,  to-day, 

164 


THE  WORK  OF  THE  CHURCH 


as  a  keen  observer  tells  us,  on  a  certain  “Devil’s  Island,”  where 
most  men  are  attempting  to  reach  reality  by  way  of  negation. 

“They  make  the  images  of  their  gods  in  Devil’s  Island,  not  by 
the  process  of  filling  them  in,  but  by  the  contrary  process  of 
hollowing  them  out.  That  is  to  say,  having  cut  the  form  out  of 
the  matter,  they  throw  the  form  away  and  worship  the  hole  that 
is  left  by  its  removal.  They  had  an  instrument  designed  for  the 
purpose.  This  instrument  was  a  wonderful  tool,  and  it  was  said 
that  the  mightiest  brains  of  Devil’s  Island  had  spent  three  thou¬ 
sand  years  in  bringing  it  to  perfection.  It  was  guaranteed  to  tear 
the  inside  out  of  anything  whether  living  or  dead,  and,  being 
made  of  all  conceivable  sizes  and  powers,  was  equally  effectual 
for  driving  a  shaft  through  mountains  of  granite  or  taking  the 
core  out  of  a  grain  of  dust.  When  at  work  it  made  an  ear-splitting, 
heart-rending  noise.  There  was  something  in  the  sound  which  re¬ 
minded  one  of  an  extremely  harsh  human  voice  saying  ‘no’  at  the 
rate  of  twenty  ‘noes’  per  second. 

Thus  in  the  course  of  time  the  whole  island  came  to  be  hollowed 
out  in  a  manner  which  not  only  rendered  walking  extremely 
dangerous,  but  demanded  excessive  care  in  respect  to  everything 
one  touched.  The  objects  which  stood  above  ground  had  to  be 
treated  in  the  same  manner  as  those  which  lay  beneath,  so  that 
you  could  never  push  aside  the  branch  of  a  tree  or  remove  a 
pebble  from  the  beach,  without  the  risk  of  disturbing  some  artistic 
enclosure  of  empty  space  and  thereby  displacing  the  pediment 
of  a  temple  or  breaking  the  nose  of  a  god. 

During  my  sojourn  on  Devil’s  Island  I  became  a  fanatical  con¬ 
vert  to  the  cult  of  Hollowness.  We  never  spoke  of  explanation. 
The  term  by  which  we  indicated  that  process  was  ‘dismissal.’  We 
congratulated  one  another  on  the  advent  of  the  age  of  enlighten¬ 
ment,  in  which,  as  we  said,  everything  has  either  been  trium¬ 
phantly  dismissed  or  has  received  notice  to  quit.  Knowledge  was 
described  as  the  Incoming  Tenant,  to  provide  for  whose  arrival 
everything  in  the  universe  was  under  Notice  to  Quit.  The  act  of 
Quitting,  we  said,  took  place  in  Time,  but  the  Notice  to  Quit  was 
eternal. 

I  well  remember  an  article  in  the  Times  of  Devil’s  Island  for 
31st  December  of  a  certain  year  in  which  it  was  proudly  claimed 

165 


THE  DISCIPLINES  OF  LIBERTY 


that  during  the  past  twelve  months  a  large  number  of  fresh  holes 
had  appeared  in  the  substance  of  Reality  owing  to  the  splendid 
labors  of  Professor  So-and-So ;  and  no  higher  honour  was  ever  paid 
to  a  Devil’s  Islander  than  that  contained  in  the  simple  epitaph 
which  a  few  years  later  was  engraved  on  this  man’s  tomb : 

He  drove  his  ploughshare  into  the  Bowels  of  Being; 

He  tunnelled  the  Universe; 

He  found  a  Fact,  and  left  a  Vacuum. 

Si  monumentum  quaeris,  circumspice.”* 

The  via  negativa  may  be  the  strait  gate  and  the  narrow  way 
that  leads  to  reality.  The  business  of  dispossessing  unlovely  fact, 
of  making  a  desert  and  calling  it  peace,  is  for  certain  austere  types 
of  mind  the  sole  arduous  trail  to  reality.  But  this  way  of  negation 
is  also  the  broad,  high  road  to  Pharisaism,  and  many  there  be  who 
follow  it,  unconsciously,  to  that  end.  In  addition  to  the  two  types 
we  noted  in  the  previous  chapter,  the  sodden  materialist  and  the 
prophetic  revolutionary,  there  is  a  third  group  which  complicates 
the  problem  of  the  present-day  Church.  Unlike  their  predecessors 
in  the  “intellectual”  tradition  these  folk  no  longer  carry  drafts  of 
the  Utopia  in  their  vest  pockets — they  carry  Notices  to  Quit. 
They  wander  freely  about  history  and  society  like  billposters, 
pasting  their  eviction  orders  on  the  doors  and  walls  of  all  our 
major  institutions.  The  notices  to  quit  are  printed  wholesale  and 
may  be  had  for  a  little  cheap  thinking  at  any  radical  headquarters, 
the  sticky  paste  of  a  sentimental  pessimism  is  easily  mixed  and 
the  inviting  walls  of  past  and  present  achievement  are  many  and 
garish.  But  these  activities,  under  present  conditions,  recruit  most 
of  their  force  from  the  unskilled  labor  of  the  human  mind,  and  are 
hardly  more  than  once  removed  from  intellectual  unemployment. 

Every  city  minister  recognizes  the  type  and  can  anticipate  its 
reaction  to  his  institution.  There  is  a  certain  nomad  group  which 
roams  around  aimlessly  from  church  to  church  to  confirm  its  own 
grievances.  These  folk  will  descend  like  the  locust  in  response  to 
an  occasional  suggestion  of  critical  pessimism,  but  they  vanish 
like  the  morning  dew  whenever  they  are  summoned  to  creative 
effort.  They  have  developed  a  mental  and  moral  flair  for  the  dry 
rot  in  the  pulpit  and  the  structural  flaws  in  the  masonry  of  the 

*  L.  P.  Jacks,  “The  Alchemy  of  Thought,”  pp.  138  ff. 

166 


THE  WORK  OF  THE  CHURCH 


Church,  but  they  have  no  power  to  see  beyond  this  obvious 
“decay  and  ceaseless  down-rushing  of  the  universal  World-fabric 
from  the  granite  mountain  to  the  man  or  day-moth.”  They  have 
become  constitutionally  unable  to  lift  the  quarry  stone  and  to 
cleave  the  green  wood  to  fashion  the  future  of  the  City  of  God. 

Confront  such  a  mind  with  a  cathedral,  and  its  major  interest  is 
not  in  the  aspirations  and  ardors  of  the  mediaeval  builder,  but  in 
his  structural  blunders  and  makeshifts.  This  mind  has  no  eye  for 
the  beauties  of  the  Galilee  at  Durham,  because  it  is  preoccupied 
with  the  damning  discovery  that  the  pillars  of  the  nave  are  not 
solid  masonry  but  are  filled  with  rubble.  This  mind  thinks  it  has 
found  the  distinctive  glory  of  Rochester  when  it  learns,  with 
holy  glee,  that  the  foundations  of  that  cathedral  were  laid,  cen¬ 
turies  ago,  in  a  marsh,  that  the  whole  fabric  has  since  settled  and 
has  had  to  be  refortified  in  these  latter  years  by  divers  working  in 
the  subterranean  mud,  burying  bags  of  concrete  around  and 
beneath  the  imperfect  work  of  the  past. 

This  familiar  type  defines  itself  ecclesiastically,  in  accordance 
with  the  dominant  temper  of  the  time,  not  by  the  Church  it  longs 
for,  but  by  the  Church  it  has  left.  Like  the  Athenian  dilettanti, 
it  will  always  crowd  up  to  Mars’  Hill  to  hear  some  new  thing, 
particularly  if  there  is  the  prospect  of  the  tart  acid  of  negation. 
But  it  will  invariably  leave  before  the  collection  is  taken  for  the 
saints  in  Jerusalem.  The  thing  has  become  a  kind  of  ecclesiastical  . 
vagrancy,  pure  and  simple,  without  any  inherent  power  to  fashion 
that  which  it  holds  to  be  the  foil  to  present  failure. 

The  old,  neglected  words  of  Jesus  about  judging  not  that  we 
be  not  judged  come  home  to  the  present  age  with  the  fresh 
validity  given  them  by  the  dominant  critical  temper  of  our  time. 
Censoriousness  soon  destroys  all  kindly  human  relationships. 
Criticism,  when  it  becomes  the  fixed  intellectual  and  moral  habit 
of  a  society,  inhibits  the  life  of  faith.  Faith  is  the  giving  of  sub¬ 
stance  to  things  hoped  for,  the  demonstration  of  that  which  is  as 
yet  unseen  and  unrealized,  a  man’s  share  in  the  nature  and  toil 
of  God.  By  faith  the  worlds  were  framed.  By  faith  men  become 
fellow  heirs  with  Jesus  who  said  of  himself,  “The  Father  worketh 
even  until  now  and  I  work.”  The  detached  attitude  of  the  critic, 
his  self-appointed  place  outside  the  effort  of  history  and  above 
the  battle  are  his  forfeit  of  faith.  He  invites  toward  himself  the 

167 


THE  DISCIPLINES  OF  LIBERTY 


indifference  which  he  assumes  toward  others.  He  obstructs  the 
whole  creative  process  in  history  when  criticism  pure  and  simple 
becomes  his  only  pathway  to  reality. 

We  need  nothing  so  much  in  the  life  of  the  modern  Church  as 
a  correction  of  the  major  critical  temper  which  is  actually  in¬ 
hibiting  the  faith  of  the  Church.  If  men  would  devote  themselves 
for  a  generation  to  an  undivided  contemplation  of  the  Church 
they  long  for  rather  than  a  caustic  condemnation  of  the  Church 
they  live  in  or  have  left,  the  Church  of  the  middle  of  the  twentieth 
century  could  not  be  recognized  as  the  issue  of  the  Church  which 
now  is.  If  we  could  only  restore  the  mood  which  fashioned  the 
Virgin  of  Chartres  we  should  not  be  driven  with  Henry  Adams  to 
the  dynamo  as  the  only  contemporary  religious  equivalent.  For 
the  mood  was  one  of  ineffable  and  pregnant  longing. 

To  single  out,  by  way  of  conclusion  to  the  whole  matter,  one 
aspect  of  the  potential  Church  of  our  deepest  desire,  an  aspect 
which  is  neither  unintelligible  nor  remotely  impracticable, — the 
Church  we  long  for  will  be  a  Holy  Catholic  Church.  There  is  no 
point  at  which  the  churches  that  now  are  fall  farther  short  of  the 
desired  reality  than  in  their  racial,  social,  temperamental  pro¬ 
vincialism.  In  this  respect  Protestantism  is  the  greatest  offender. 

There  has  been  much  gain  for  religion  in  the  Protestant  vindica¬ 
tion  of  the  plain  man’s  right  to  believe  in  God  and  to  worship  God 
in  his  own  vernacular.  Protestantism  in  idea  is  a  perpetual  Pente¬ 
cost  in  which  each  man  may  hear  the  good  news  in  his  own  tongue. 
But  Pentecost  without  an  initial  and  sustaining  experience  of  real 
religion  soon  and  easily  degenerates  into  Babel,  a  hopeless  con¬ 
fusion  of  the  corporate  aim  and  effort.  Conversely,  Romanism  has 
maintained  a  spurious  catholicity  under  the  dull,  leaden  incubus 
of  mediaeval  Latin  and  all  that  that  means.  The  Thomasian  mind 
still  serves  in  a  fashion  to  express  the  religion  of  “all  men,  every¬ 
where,  always,”  in  the  sense  that  it  no  longer  expresses  the  spiritual 
life  of  any  particular  man  anywhere.  It  is  the  night  in  which  all 
cows  are  black,  and  in  so  far  forth  seems  still  to  achieve  a  certain 
catholicity.  But  the  actual  fact  is  that  there  is  no  Holy  Church 
Universal  in  the  world  of  to-day.  Romanism  still  makes  claim  to 
that  Unity  on  the  basis  of  dogmas  and  liturgies  which  serve  as 
well  as  any  other  as  a  meeting  place  for  men  who  say,  “Credimus 
quia  impossibile  est.”  Protestantism,  in  practice,  is  simply  the 

168 


THE  WORK  OF  THE  CHURCH 


ecclesiastical  sanction  for  birds  of  a  feather  to  foregather  and  breed 
in  their  particular  island  of  Arctic  isolation. 

The  most  interesting  church  venture  which  has  been  attempted 
in  our  time  is  that  of  the  Roman  Catholic  modernist,  who  as  a. 
historical  fact  has  now  been  ruled  out  of  court.  The  thing  he  was 
after  is  the  thing  we  all  want.  Perhaps  he  was  the  forerunner  of 
some  genuinely  Christlike  Church-to-be.  Certainly  he  aimed  to 
combine  the  intellectual  and  ethical  liberty  of  the  Protestant 
with  the  Roman  experience  of  catholicity.  That  he  failed  was  the 
fault  and  the  tragedy  of  Rome.  But  he  found  even  in  Romanism 
a  shadow  of  the  reality  which  every  lover  of  the  Church  desires, 
and  that  shadow  was  actually  cast  by  the  invisible  reality. 

Religion  may  be  defined  as  the  experience  of  communion  or 
union  with  God.  There  are  rare  natures  who  in  rare  moments  are 
given  this  experience  in  its  ineffable  simplicity  and  totality.  But 
both  the  temperament  which  is  capable  of  this  mystical  rapture 
and  the  times  and  seasons  of  the  experience  itself  are  beyond  our 
human  control.  And  a  practical  mysticism,  which  is  what  the 
present  age  needs  above  all  else,  will  seek  to  suggest  the  nature 
of  religion  by  the  homely  intimations  to  be  drawn  from  life  in 
the  market  place,  rather  than  from  the  ineffable  transactions  of 
those  who  have  finally  found  themselves  “in  the  desert  of  the 
Godhead.” 

The  business  of  the  Church  is  to  persuade  men  of  their  actual 
union  with  God  through  the  life  of  faith  and  conduct.  Contem¬ 
porary  Christianity  ought  to  be  a  dawning  and  maturing  experi¬ 
ence  of  personal  identity  with  the  Wisdom  and  Spirit  of  the  Uni¬ 
verse.  No  clue  to  that  experience  is  too  homely  or  trivial  to  be 
followed  to  its  destination  in  God.  That  is  what  the  life  of  affec¬ 
tion  and  friendship  ultimately  means.  That  is  what  the  solace  and 
serenity  of  nature  suggest.  That  is  where  the  comradeship  of 
human  service  leads.  Religion  is  this  overwhelming  sense  of 
Oneness,  suggested  and  mediated  to  us  by  the  rich  and  varied 
interests  of  daily  life.  If  all  ancient  roads  led  to  Rome,  so  all 
right  and  honorable  ways  of  modern  life  ought  to  lead  to  God. 
And  the  major  task  of  the  Christian  Church  is  not  only  to  make 
that  simple  affirmation,  but  to  achieve  the  actual  experience  in 
its  noblest  and  most  adequate  form,  primarily  through  the  offices 
of  public  worship. 


169 


THE  DISCIPLINES  OF  LIBERTY 


The  tragedy  of  modern  life  rests  very  largely  on  the  fact  that 
the  centrifugal  and  divisive  forces  are  so  many  and  so  powerful 
and  the  centripetal  energy  so  weak.  The  increasing  pace  of  compe¬ 
tition  in  business,  professional  and  political  life  is  constantly  hurl¬ 
ing  small  groups  of  men  and  detached  individuals  off  onto  the  soli¬ 
tary  tangents  of  their  own  pursuits.  A  tremendous  case  can  be 
made  for  the  loneliness  of  modern  life.  Under  present  conditions 
distinction  and  success  seem  to  offer  only  at  the  end  of  intensive 
specialization.  The  utility  man  on  the  ball  team,  the  jack  of  all 
trades  in  industry  and  the  general  practitioner  in  professional  life 
have  more  points  of  contact  with  the  world  than  has  the  specialist. 
Their  human  rewards,  their  actual  pleasure  in  the  game  of  life, 
may  be  greater  than  his.  But  given  such  a  world  as  we  now  have, 
opportunity  beckons  down  the  trail  of  specialization. 

Any  man  who  has  stepped  off  the  highway  of  general  human 
concern  to  follow  one  of  these  trails  knows  something  of  the  lost 
feeling  involved  in  the  adventure.  The  summons  to  independence 
of  mind  which  comes  with  all  the  intensive  research  work  of  the 
modern  world  is  also  a  summons  to  solitude.  The  intellectual 
pioneer  must  leave  the  country  of  accredited  knowledge  and  the 
companionship  of  kindred  minds  and  go  out  into  the  unknown. 

Something  hidden.  Go  and  find  it.  Go  and  look  behind  the  Ranges — 

Something  lost  behind  the  Ranges.  Lost  and  waiting  for  you.  Go! 

The  explorer  knows  that  the  adventure  is  its  own  reward. 

My  price  was  paid  me  ten  times  over  by  my  Maker. 

But  you  wouldn’t  understand  it.  You  go  up  and  occupy. 

But  there  are  hours  when  the  typical  freeman  of  our  day  is  bur¬ 
dened  by  the  heavy  oppression  of  his  detachment  and  remoteness 
from  the  common  mind.  What  was  for  the  pioneering  type  once  a 
thing  of  physical  geography,  has  now  become  a  matter  of  spiritual 
realities.  The  man  who  is  blazing  a  trail  along  some  single  line 
into  the  primeval  wilderness  of  human  ignorance  will  never  com¬ 
plain  that  life  is  without  its  zest.  But  he  must  miss  the  heartening 
companionship  of  his  human  kind. 

Freedom,  then,  in  the  distinctive  and  significant  labors  of  our 
own  time,  carries  with  it  a  certain  disintegrating  principle  which 
is  constantly  resolving  the  social  whole  into  its  units.  The  more 

170 


THE  WORK  OF  THE  CHURCH 


independent  a  man  is  and  the  farther  he  has  carried  his  task  as  a 
specialist,  the  wider  the  gap  which  opens  between  himself  and  his 
fellows.  So  far  as  the  private  professional  compensations  for  living 
are  concerned,  life  abundant  is  to  be  found  on  these  trails.  But, 
at  the  outset  certainly,  they  lead  away  from  the  more  obvious 
forms  of  the  experience  of  catholicity. 

The  deeper  and  more  difficult  task  of  the  Christian  Church  is 
concerned  with  the  closing  of  these  gaps  in  the  modern  world. 
Religion  has  no  interest  to  recall  the  freeman  from  his  pioneering 
labors.  Indeed,  for  the  pioneer  the  whole  initial  half  of  personal 
religion  must  lie  in  the  exercise  of  this  liberty  of  mind  apart  from 
all  ecclesiastical  leading  strings.  It  is  vain  to  try  to  persuade  the 
serious  men  and  women  of  our  day,  who  are  doing  the  creative 
work  of  the  human  mind  by  perfecting  themselves  in  their  par¬ 
ticular  and  distinctive  fields,  that  religion  ought  to  impose  or  can 
rightly  impose  any  limits  upon  their  research.  Religion  for  the 
biologist  must  be,  before  all  else,  a  matter  of  thinking  God’s 
thoughts  after  him,  in  the  life  history  of  the  liver-fluke.  No 
crusader,  kneeling  naked  in  a  night-long  vigil  before  a  candle- 
lighted  altar  in  a  gloomy  cathedral,  has  ever  established  historical 
claim  to  a  religiousness  denied  the  modern  astronomer  who 
through  the  hours  of  darkness,  the  world  forgetting  and  by  the 
world  forgot,  follows  some  freshly  visioned  nebula  across  the 
heavens  with  his  hundred-inch  telescope. 

So,  in  the  less  specialized  areas  of  human  knowledge  and  labor, 
where  there  is  a  measure  of  comradeship,  the  Church  cannot  per¬ 
suade  the  distinctive  social  and  professional  groups  that  religion 
demands  any  denial  of  their  native  human  loyalty.  The  Church 
cannot  expect  the  artisan  to  resign  from  his  labor  union,  which 
gives  him  in  intense  but  restricted  form  a  truly  social  experience. 
Nor  can  the  Church  hope  to  win  recruits  by  denying  to  doctors, 
lawyers  and  teachers  the  strong  fellowship  of  their  several  voca¬ 
tions.  The  Church  of  to-day  signs  with  generous  good  will  the 
Magna  Charta  of  all  these  new  liberties  of  the  human  spirit.  She 
finds,  in  a  restricted  sense,  something  of  her  own  nature  and  mis¬ 
sion  in  these  intense  companionships  of  modern  toil.  She  cannot 
now  recall  or  revoke  the  right  which  has  been  granted  to  all  sorts 
and  conditions  of  men  to  live  freely  and  adventurously  along  the 
lines  of  their  individual  gifts. 

171 


THE  DISCIPLINES  OF  LIBERTY 


We  must  recognize  the  fact,  however,  that  the  problem  for  the 
Holy  Church  Universal  is  being  vastly  complicated  by  the  present 
dissociation  of  society  into  human  units  and  restricted  groups. 
Her  own  interior  sects  may  be  a  nominal  denial  of  her  claim  to 
catholicity.  But  the  real  nub  of  the  problem  is  to  be  found,  not  in 
the  multiplied  denominations,  but  in  the  increasing  schisms  be¬ 
tween  all  our  modern  vocations.  Given  an  Episcopalian  lawyer  and 
a  Congregational  chemist,  the  two  are  far  nearer  one  another  reli¬ 
giously  as  Episcopalian  and  Congregationalist  than  as  lawyer  and 
chemist,  since  for  both  of  these  men  the  major  realities  of  life 
center  about  the  noun  of  them  rather  than  the  adjective.  The  task 
of  the  modern  Church  is  not  a  mere  reconciliation  of  the  de¬ 
nominational  differences  between  these  men.  It  is  a  spiritual 
interpretation  of  their  two  vocations,  each  to  the  other.  The 
deeper  problem  of  Church  Unity  is  more  than  a  matter  of  sec¬ 
tarian  compromise  and  cooperation,  it  is  one  of  total  social  trans¬ 
lation.  Conceivably  the  Church  Unity  program  might  be  brought 
to  some  provisional  conclusion  by  the  merging  of  the  denomina¬ 
tions,  but  the  resultant  comprehensive  body  would  be  no  more 
a  true  Church  Universal  than  the  scattered  sects  of  the  present, 
simply  because  the  religious  problem  in  its  broadest  and  deepest 
aspects  to-day  is  not  a  healing  of  sectarian  schisms  but  a  restoring 
of  the  interrupted  and  broken  lines  of  human  communication 
between  the  major  groups  of  the  industrial,  professional  and  politi¬ 
cal  world,  and  between  all  adventurous  and  pioneering  freemen 
now  cut  off  from  the  strong  and  sustaining  companionship  of  men 
of  kindred  spirit. 

The  modern  Church  sometimes  attempts  to  unite  these  persons 
on  the  ground  of  a  common  avocation,  lying  quite  outside  their 
major  and  imperious  vocations.  She  enlists  them  in  “church  work” 
under  her  own  distinctive  aegis.  But  “church  work”  in  any  con¬ 
siderable  volume  is  a  luxury  and  a  labor  of  supererogation  denied 
to  the  busiest  and  most  effective  men  and  women  of  our  day. 
Their  vocation  fills  the  eight,  ten,  twelve  hours  of  the  working  day. 
It  takes  its  toll  of  the  best  of  a  man’s  strength  and  ardor.  There 
remain  for  “church  work”  only  those  meager  margins  of  time  and 
interest  which  do  not  represent  the  real  man. 

Mark  Rutherford  says  that  men  ought  not  to  despise  those 
devices  to  which  nature  resorts  to  save  us  from  ourselves,  those 

172 


THE  WORK  OF  THE  CHURCH 


liberating  avocations  which  are  our  spiritual  exercise  outside  the 
prison  shop  and  prison  cell  of  our  particular  task.  Butterfly 
catching,  stamp  collecting,  violin  practice,  the  study  of  poetry, 
all  these  save  a  man  from  himself  and  have  inherent  spiritual 
worth.  A  representative  American  has  recently  said  that  the  longer 
he  lives  the  more  he  is  driven  to  the  conclusion  that  the  only 
important  hours  in  his  life  are  the  hours  outside  the  day’s  work, 
for  it  is  then  only  that  he  has  time  to  devote  himself  to  the  things 
that  really  matter  in  this  world. 

The  religious  pathos  and  perplexity  of  modern  life  arises  from 
the  fact  that  for  many  men  their  specialization  has  lost  its  initial 
religious  meaning  and  become  a  manual  or  mental  drudgery, 
and  that  they  are  driven  to  seek  religion  in  their  avocations.  There 
is  no  least  prospect  that  for  generations  to  come  men  are  to  be 
released  from  specialized  labor  of  hand  and  brain.  The  multipli¬ 
cation  of  industrial  and  professional  species  is  apparently  an 
inevitable  social  fact.  Liberty  of  inquiry  and  effort  leads  in  that 
direction.  But  it  is  as  true  of  the  spiritual  life  of  man  as  of  his 
political  life  that  every  liberator  becomes  in  turn  a  tyrant.  And 
the  problem  which  the  Christian  Church  faces  to-day,  as  it  dreams 
of  its  mission  and  possibilities,  is  the  keen  problem  occasioned  by 
the  mental  tyranny  of  the  intensively  specialized  vocations  of  the 
modern  world. 

Something  may  be  done  to  heal  the  situation,  temporarily,  by 
offering  to  the  men  of  our  time  the  common  avocations  of  ordinary 
church  work.  In  particular  those  maturer  natures  who  have  come 
to  the  point  when  they  wish  to  see  life  steadily  and  see  it  whole, 
as  well  as  to  see  it  intently,  may  be  reunited  to  their  fellow 
seekers  after  God,  in  some  small  measure,  through  the  normal 
interests  and  activities  of  the  average  parish.  There  is  a  certain 
type  of  business  and  professional  man  who  has  come  to  the  point 
where  he  wishes  deliberately  to  give  more  time  to  the  “work  of 
the  Church,”  because  he  wishes  to  restore  the  balance  of  life.  But 
the  younger  generation,  staking  out  its  holdings  in  the  world  of 
to-morrow,  has  no  time  for  these  avocations.  And  the  hope  of 
the  Church  rests  with  those  who  are  still  preoccupied  with  their 
vocations,  to  the  neglect  of  conventional  ecclesiastical  avocations. 

If  the  Church  is  to  hold  the  rising  generation  and  make  appre¬ 
ciable  advance  toward  the  experience  of  religious  catholicity  she 

173 


THE  DISCIPLINES  OF  LIBERTY 


must  harden  her  heart  against  the  limited  avocations  she  can  offer 
men,  and  must  devote  herself,  first  to  sustaining  the  initial  reli¬ 
gious  enthusiasms  of  every  form  of  freedom  and  then  to  the  inter¬ 
pretation  of  all  forms  of  modern  freedom,  the  one  to  the  other. 

Canon  Barnett  in  East  London  came  to  doubt  whether  any 
such  thing  as  distinctive  “religious  education”  is  now  possible, 
whether  religion  can  be  dissociated  as  a  separate  entity  from  the 
multiplied  interests  of  modern  life.  At  least  he  reached  the  point 
where  he  saw  the  futility  of  enlisting  semi-religious  persons  to 
teach  so-called  religious  subjects.  He  preferred  to  have  religious 
men  and  women  teach  any  and  all  subjects,  believing  that  essen¬ 
tial  and  vital  religion  could  be  more  effectively  mediated  in  this 
way.  Religious  education  in  Toynbee  Hall  meant,  therefore,  classes 
in  Botany,  Chemistry,  Clay  Modeling,  Geology,  Shorthand,  Sing¬ 
ing,  Wood  Carving  and  a  hundred  other  subjects. 

The  modern  Church  would  do  well  to  study  that  splendid  effort 
to  lighten  the  heavy  and  weary  weight  of  life  in  Whitechapel. 
Toynbee  Hall  was  not  severely  ecclesiastical  nor  conventionally 
religious,  but  it  came  far  nearer  realizing,  under  Canon  Barnett, 
something  of  the  nature  of  the  Holy  Church  Universal  than  the 
average  modern  parish.  The  secret  of  its  influence  and  success  lay 
in  its  entire  readiness  to  grant  the  inherent  religiousness  of  any 
specialized  human  interest,  at  the  same  time  that  it  interpreted 
the  Clay  Modeler  to  the  Wood  Carver  through  the  medium  of  the 
common  spirit.  That  Clay  Modeling  and  Wood  Carving  were 
avocations  for  the  costers  of  the  East  End  was  an  incident  in  the 
history  of  Toynbee  Hall.  Barnett  knew  where  his  method  led,  and 
what  his  experiments  implied,  and  he  looked  ultimately  to  the 
whole  restatement  of  the  Christian  life  in  terms  of  the  major 
vocations  of  our  time  inspired  and  reunited  by  a  genuinely  catholic 
Christian  spirit. 

Tyrrell,  also,  came  finally  to  doubt  whether  the  Christian  reli¬ 
gion  as  such  can  ever  be  extricated  intact  from  its  setting  in  his¬ 
tory.  He  starts  with  the  initial  and  inevitable  historical  judgment 
that  Jesus  never  intended  to  found  a  new  and  distinct  religion, 
but  sought  rather  the  spiritualizing  of  the  life  which  he  met  at 
hand.  “Christianity  was,  therefore,  not  a  religion,  but  a  spirit, 
mode  or  quality  of  religion,  which  might  be  found  in  various 
religions,  but  never  apart  by  itself,  as  it  were  a  ‘subsistent  quality.’ 

i74 


THE  WORK  OF  THE  CHURCH 


...  To  speak  of  a  ‘pure  unadulterated  Christianity’  is  really 
nonsense.”  Dean  Inge  is  thinking  in  the  same  direction,  “Saint 
Paul  understood  what  most  Christians  never  realize,  namely,  that 
the  Gospel  of  Christ  is  not  a  religion,  but  religion  itself  in  its 
most  universal  and  deepest  aspects.” 

Certainly  the  epochs  of  creative  effort  and  of  substantial  ad¬ 
vance  in  Christian  history  have  been  those  when  men  inter¬ 
preted  religion  in  this  intensive  yet  catholic  spirit.  Such  a  religion 
is  intensive  because  it  sets  about  the  business  of  releasing  the 
latent  religiousness  of  each  particular  department  of  life.  It  is 
catholic  because  it  seeks  to  inspire  all  vocations  and  interests  by 
a  common  spirit.  Christianity,  thus  interpreted,  becomes  not  an 
added  entity  outside  the  major  tasks  of  daily  life,  a  mere  common 
ecclesiastical  avocation  for  the  margins  of  men’s  energy,  but  the 
sum  of  all  particulars  of  unselfish  and  sacrificial  service  in  the 
day’s  work,  and  an  experience  of  the  actual  community  of  sus¬ 
taining  spirit.  This  is  the  real  work  of  the  Church  in  the  world 
of  to-day,  and  nothing  less  than  this  will  gain  the  interest  and 
hold  the  loyalty  of  men  and  women,  who  for  worse  if  not  for 
better,  are  irrevocably  committed  to  one  or  another  of  the  imperi¬ 
ous  vocations  of  modern  life.  The  Church  stands  in  the  world  of 
to-day,  not  to  offer  men  trivial  and  relatively  unreal  avocations, 
for  the  exercise  of  the  religious  spirit,  but  to  recover  and  to 
incarnate  the  lost  experience  of  human  catholicity.  If  we  do  not 
win  our  initial  experience  of  union  with  God  by  way  of  the  felt 
solidarity  of  human  interest  and  purpose,  then  religion  remains  a 
negligible  addendum  to  our  busy  days,  but  not  its  heartening 
genius.  And  the  Holy  Church  Universal  will  still  linger  long  after 
“Church  Unity”  has  arrived,  because  the  raucous  Babel  voices  of 
the  specialists  will  still  drown  out  the  common  theological  ver¬ 
nacular  of  the  reconciled  sects. 

Upon  the  continued  presence  of  the  religious  freeman  in  the 
world  to-day  the  modern  Church  may  safely  count.  No  one  who 
knows  our  time  well  questions  the  fact  that  there  are  in  all  walks 
of  life  countless  busy  men  and  women,  with  little  time  for  church 
avocations,  who  are  really  doing  Christ’s  work  in  history.  Wher¬ 
ever  teachers  are  mediating  the  truth,  wherever  lawyers  are  striv¬ 
ing  to  vindicate  the  eternal  justice,  wherever  doctors  and  nurses 
are  healing,  wherever  honest  men  are  producing  and  exchanging 

175 


THE  DISCIPLINES  OF  LIBERTY 


the  necessities  of  life,  there  the  work  of  God’s  Kingdom  is  going  on. 
Many  such  are  consciously  trying  to  do  their  task  in  a  Christian 
spirit  and  for  Christian  ends.  They  are  very  busy  folk.  Our  age 
drives  men  at  high  pressure.  Men  and  women  in  our  cities  are 
tired.  Less  and  less  will  the  wise  modern  church  seek  to  draw 
these  persons  away  from  their  effective  vocations  to  the  less 
effective  avocations  which  she  can  offer  them.  Her  task  is  to  help 
them  bear  the  load  they  have  assumed,  to  bear  it  with  a  fine 
resilience,  and  keep  replenished  and  refreshed  the  reservoirs  of 
spiritual  enthusiasm  which  makes  all  honorable  tasks  a  part  of 
the  toil  of  God  in  history. 

But  there  is  one  thing  that  all  these  folk  need  and  they  need 
it  more  and  more  keenly  as  the  years  go  on,  a  sense  of  the  common 
quality  of  spirit  which  goes  into  their  varied  labor.  They  are  in 
constant  peril  of  becoming  religiously  provincial  and  at  times  of 
becoming  religiously  discouraged  because  they  do  not  sense  the 
host  of  kindred  prophetic  spirits  all  around  them  in  the  modern 
world. 

Where  are  these  specialists  to  meet  on  any  common  ground? 
They  are  reticent  as  to  affirmations  of  the  religious  idealism  of 
their  own  task.  They  do  not  sense  the  spiritual  quality  in  their 
brothers’  vocations.  These  unecclesiastical  Christians  show  forth 
the  gospel  with  their  lives  far  more  naturally  and  effectively  than 
with  their  lips.  But  somehow  between  this  reticence  and  this  lack 
of  sympathetic  insight  the  very  real  and  profound  catholicity  of 
modern  Christianity  falls  to  the  ground  and  is  forgotten.  The 
lawyer  will  not  sense  the  truly  religious  spirit  of  the  artist’s  studio. 
The  doctor  will  fail  to  understand  the  religious  motif  which  goes 
to  the  teaching  of  English  literature.  The  business  man  will  miss 
the  profoundly  religious  spirit  which  keeps  the  nurses  at  their 
task.  The  housewife  will  not  catch  the  religious  idealism  which 
sustains  the  public  librarian.  Each  of  us,  when  he  steps  outside 
the  boundaries  of  his  own  vocation,  is  a  stranger  on  the  alien  soils 
of  the  other  major  callings.  Because  we  fear  to  make  public  fools 
of  ourselves  we  keep  our  silence  when  we  go  intellectually  visiting. 
But  all  the  time  there  is  something  craving  to  be  said,  some  tacit 
bond  of  felt  sympathy  crying  for  candid  recognition. 

It  is  with  these  forms  of  mature  spiritual  freedom  in  the  modern 
world  as  it  is  with  brothers  grown  to  manhood.  The  hunger  for 

176 


THE  WORK  OF  THE  CHURCH 


some  recognition  of  the  commonalty  of  their  heritage  and  experi¬ 
ence  deepens  with  the  years.  What  we  took  for  granted  in  child¬ 
hood  and  youth  we  somehow  crave  to  express  in  our  maturity. 
Yet  this  thing  can  never  be  said  in  the  vernacular  of  our  separate 
callings.  We  found  homes  of  our  own  and  go  our  ways  in  the 
world.  My  home  must  always  be  a  strange  place  to  my  brother  and 
at  the  best  he  can  be  only  a  guest  with  me.  So  my  brother’s  home 
can  never  be  a  truly  common  meeting  ground  and  I  must  be 
content  to  play  the  guest  in  turn  when  I  go  to  him.  That  is  why 
we  wish  the  father’s  home  kept  always  open,  that  we  may  go 
there  again  and  again,  to  share  without  restraint  the  common 
blood  ties  of  our  manhood  and  to  renew  the  purposes  and  enthu¬ 
siasms  of  our  youth.  It  is  under  that  roof  tree  where  our  manhood 
was  conceived  and  nurtured  that  we  meet  without  restraint,  no 
matter  how  old  we  have  grown  or  how  widely  we  have  scattered, 
to  know  and  feel  the  bond  that  makes  us  one. 

In  something  of  the  same  way  the  Church  of  to-day  stands  in 
the  modern  world  as  the  Father’s  house,  where  the  mature  forms 
of  Christian  liberty  may  still  know  their  commonalty  of  Christian 
heritage  and  inspiration.  Whatever  else  a  discerning  modern 
Church  tries  to  do  for  men,  she  will  seek  to  be  a  place  where  the 
Christian  doctor,  the  Christian  teacher,  the  Christian  lawyer,  the 
Christian  workman,  the  Christian  employer,  may  meet  under  the 
Father’s  roof  tree  and  around  the  Father’s  table. 

There  is  no  other  institution  which  can  keep  open  spiritual 
house  for  all  sorts  and  conditions  of  men.  The  common  tradition 
still  rests  in  the  Church  no  matter  how  independent  our  major 
vocations  may  have  become  intellectually  and  morally.  And  the 
only  institution  which  still  stands  for  the  religious  interest  alone, 
no  matter  how  ineffectually,  is  the  Church. 

The  minister  of  to-day  who  visualizes  the  relation  of  his  pulpit 
to  his  world  will  see  that  pulpit  not  as  a  Saint  Simeon’s  pillar 
from  which  he  may  exhort  the  lesser  breeds  without  the  law.  He 
will  see  it  as  the  crossroads  of  the  world’s  vocations,  the  clearing 
house  of  the  common  interests  of  all  forms  of  free  Christian  service 
in  our  time.  And  he  will  see  his  church  not  as  a  city  of  refuge, 
not  as  a  citadel  of  orthodoxy,  not  as  a  foil  to  all  other  institutions, 
but  as  the  home  of  God  in  history,  where  God  still  meets  his  sons 

177 


THE  DISCIPLINES  OF  LIBERTY 


in  that  deep  and  friendly  companionship  which  arises  when  chil¬ 
dren  grown  to  full  and  free  manhood  turn  home  again. 

Whatever  else  she  may  be,  the  modern  Church  should  be  above 
all  things  the  place  where  any  and  every  man  who  is  trying  to  do 
God’s  work  through  Christ’s  spirit  may  meet  and  know  all  sorts 
and  conditions  of  men  who  are  trying  to  do  the  same  work  in  the 
same  way.  The  Church  ought  to  be  the  place  where  the  truly  reli¬ 
gious  man  will  be  prompted  to  know  and  to  say, 

Men  and  I  be  blood  brethren 
I  will  drink  of  no  ditch,  of  no  deep  knowledge, 

But  from  the  Common  Cups — all  Christian  souls. 

The  Church  stands  in  our  bewildering  world  with  its  intensive 
specialization  driving  each  one  of  us  off  onto  the  tangent  of  his 
own  particular  vocation,  to  say  quite  simply  and  directly  to  us  all, 
“One  is  your  father  and  all  ye  are  brethren.” 


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